UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGE 
 
 1FORNSA 
 LES
 
 Contemporary Mrtters 
 
 Edited by W. Robertson Nicoll, LL. D, 
 
 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 5 2 4 2 8
 
 r
 
 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 BY 
 
 ANNIE MACDONELL 
 
 LONDON 
 
 HODDER & STOUGHTON 
 
 27 Paternoster Row 
 
 1894
 
 Edinburgh : T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty
 
 A 1 £ 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 Introductory, 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST — I., . . 1 3 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST — II., . . 27 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 * STORYWRIGHT, 69 
 
 I 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 MEN AND WOMEN, 87 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 ) 
 
 . HUMOURIST, 117 
 
 .
 
 vi CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 PROSE WRITER, I39 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 PAINTER OF NATURE, 153 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 WESSEX, 175 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 POINT OF VIEW, 209
 
 Portrait of Thomas Hardy . Frontispiece 
 Map of Wessex .... facing p. 175
 
 INTRODUCTORY
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 There can be no attempt at finality in 
 a criticism of Mr. Hardy : he is now in 
 the full vigour of his genius, and he has 
 well prepared us for surprises. But the 
 volume of his work is already large ; and 
 there is a natural delight in counting and 
 sifting a heap of treasure, even though the 
 pile is being added to while our hands are in 
 it, and its net value being possibly altered. 
 And if this — be it personal gratification, or 
 pious homage to the source of the treasure — 
 is not reason enough for one more attempt 
 to appraise it, I have no other. Mr. Hardy 
 is lucid : he needs no explanation ; no 
 apology : his work can defend itself ; and
 
 4 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 he has probably all the popularity he 
 desires. But he presents abundance of 
 points for study, and though his unexpected 
 developments have been many, and his 
 caprices not a few, some distinctive features 
 are clearly enough traceable from his 
 earliest to his most recent page to prevent 
 a criticism of his work being a thing of . 
 shreds and patches. 
 
 Touching and influencing the main 
 streams of art and thought to-day at cer- 
 tain points, at others standing far apart from 
 them, Mr. Hardy holds just now a position 
 of special interest ; and in the long line of 
 English novelists his is a noticeable figure. 
 He has made really new departures which 
 are no mere accidents of the day he has 
 lived in ; he has resisted some impulses of 
 his time as sturdily as in other directions he 
 has been a revolutionary. You may quote 
 him as an example of the observance, and 
 as a warning against the breach, of the same 
 canons of criticism if you happen to hold
 
 INTRODUCTORY 5 
 
 with any. He is that interesting subject, a 
 writer that cannot be labelled. Ready-made 
 theories about realism, naturalism, and ro- 
 manticism, are misfits as applied to him : 
 his methods are as wayward as the loves of 
 his heroines. 
 
 In spite of the modern habit of diligently 
 searching for a writer's literary parentage, a 
 criticism of Mr. Hardy may start from him- 
 self. The sun and wind of other minds 
 shone and blew on him, of course, and fed 
 his growth, and there are marks for all who 
 read closely that certain men and books 
 have left on him strong imprints. But he 
 has been nobody's docile pupil. He has 
 disciplined himself well in thinking and 
 observing, and his eye and ear are naturally 
 quick and true. But for style and form, 
 pattern and tone, he has gone to school just 
 when and where he liked. The worse for 
 the smoothness of the web, and its value 
 among dealers who judge by rule of thumb. 
 But there are other tests.
 
 6 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 Among the many blunders that line the 
 path of the random art of literary criticism, 
 perhaps none has been more unintelligent 
 than that which attributed Mr. Hardy's first 
 widely-known story to George Eliot. The 
 guess seems wild now, but the notion still 
 remains that her influence was great in the 
 shaping of his literary methods. So it may 
 have been : it is a point better settled by 
 information than by internal evidence, which 
 is far from distinct. In a few instances his 
 humour looks as if it had meant to be after a 
 George Eliot pattern, but had turned out 
 something entirely different. The best novels 
 of both have rustic backgrounds ; both have 
 made prominent the speech and humours of 
 English peasants ; both are marked by a 
 strong intellectual fibre. But in aim, style, 
 and temperament, it would be difficult to 
 name two writers of fiction more dissimilar. 
 And of no other novelist does he call up a 
 clear remembrance : certainly no very pro- 
 fitable comparison can be made between
 
 INTRODUCTORY 7 
 
 him and his contemporaries. In one point, 
 in his representation of the ceaseless warring 
 of human nature with itself and fatal circum- 
 stance, his final aim, he puts us in mind of 
 Balzac, and as soon as the likeness is named 
 the great differences in their methods rise 
 up to obscure it. 
 
 Kinship he has with other writers, but 
 they are not writers of fiction, and they are 
 of another time than ours. He has borrowed ; 
 but his borrowings have been open and 
 audacious. Where he is not looking with 
 his own peculiarly independent gaze at the 
 world, it is nobody less than Shakespeare 
 that has lent him eyesight. This, of course, 
 does not affect Mr. Hardy's rank in litera- 
 ture : whatever it may be he has earned it 
 by other qualities than skill in adaptation. 
 Nor has it reference to the fact that the 
 novelist at his supremest moments is a trage- 
 dian. It is Shakespeare's lighter vein, as 
 'fancy's child,' that the skill of the story- 
 teller has adapted to the interpretation of an
 
 8 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 England two and a half centuries older. 
 Some of Mr. Hardy's much loved and exas- 
 perating heroines are Shakespearian. His 
 rustics are of his own Wessex soil, but per- 
 haps Shakespeare gave him the courage and 
 example to extract and distil their wit in de- 
 fiance of what stands for probability in minds 
 of conventional experience. Fancy, a rare 
 quality, plays out and in persistently amid 
 the gloomiest scenes of the Wessex stories ; 
 for the novelist of to-day whose final aim 
 points most clearly to the tragedy of life, is 
 yet the one of all others who best recalls that 
 the careless airy brightness of an earlier world 
 is unexhausted yet — a brightness, by the by, 
 having nothing to do with happiness, being 
 rather a gleam of outside sunshine, elfish and 
 irresponsible, taking little account of the 
 reason for living or of its futility, but very 
 nearly concerned with its possibility. 
 
 Mr. Hardy began his literary career with 
 a stock of thoughts and a view of life consider- 
 ably in advance of, or different from, those
 
 INTRODUCTORY 9 
 
 of the majority of his contemporaries. The 
 distinctly intellectual quality of his genius 
 has hardly been adequately recognised, and 
 indeed this feature is apt to be ignored in a 
 novelist, save where it is out of proportion 
 to the imaginative powers, as in the case of 
 George Eliot. Fearle ss thinking and a sense 
 of hu mour having been his from the first, he 
 has rarelvb een taken unawares and captu red 
 b y the fashions^ nd-crazes among his fellow- 
 craftsmen at any moment. In his time we 
 "riaveThad the psychological, the historico- 
 romantic, the neurotic, the erotic, the photo- 
 graphic, and many another school, and each 
 has looked on itself as the advance guard. 
 Mr. Hardy has contributed to more than 
 one, and joined none. Yet he is still, 
 admittedly, in England, the leader into freer 
 paths. Peculiarly unprofessional in tone, he 
 never echoes the literary club, coterie,' or 
 review, and in a generation fussily proud of 
 all its little efforts at thinking, which makes 
 continual discovery of problems, and many
 
 io THOMAS HARDY 
 
 solemn statements of them, he has not very 
 often worn his serious purposes on his sleeve. 
 But you will find good thought and earnest- 
 ness wrought closely into the fibre of his 
 work — enough of these to bar his way to any 
 very wide popularity — and he has impress- 
 ively dramatised a problem or two, neither 
 particularly new nor old, but of a kind to be 
 met with so long as our present civilisation 
 lasts. Now standing aloof from the time, 
 and again its ally, but never enrolled in the 
 regular army, he has been a valiant free- 
 lance,
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A 
 NOVELIST
 
 II 
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A 
 NOVELIST 
 
 i 
 
 Thomas Hardy was born near Dorchester, 
 June 2, 1840, and he lives in Dorchester 
 now. That only a little portion of his life 
 has been spent away from that neighbour- 
 hood is the most significant fact of his 
 biography. Wessex, with its natural beauty, 
 its remoteness, its lingering old world 
 customs, has been not merely a picturesque 
 background to his tales. They have grown 
 in Wessex air, ,and he has dug them out 
 of Wessex soil.! In most other novels the 
 scenery could be altered with little effect
 
 14 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 on the action or the characters. In Mr. 
 Hardy's it is always inevitable and organic. 
 There has been in recent years a strong 
 revival of local sentiment, and folk-lore, 
 fiction, and pictorial art have reflected it. 
 The very restlessness of modern life has 
 nourished a love for some abiding-place, 
 where the heart and the imagination can 
 turn to for a home and for repose; and 
 regret for the old world so quickly passing 
 away has inspired many picturesque chroni- 
 clers. | The spirit of nationalism, one of the 
 strongest motive-powers of the century, has 
 had this as its local counterpart] But Mr. 
 Hardy's attachment, and his choice of 
 habitation for the creatures of his imagina- 
 tion, are almost too personal to be set down 
 to the contagion of a movement. . White 
 has not Selborne more precisely in his eye ; 
 Wordsworth has not with greater love in- 
 terpreted the soul of the hills and lakes he 
 was born amongst; Burns and Ayrshire 
 have not a closer association. And no other
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST 15 
 
 writer of fiction has been at once so truth- 
 ful and so poetic a historian of his county. 
 You will more easily find a parallel among 
 painters than among men of letters. 
 
 It was perhaps fortunate that Mr. Hardy's 
 education enabled him to be early obedient 
 to his own instincts. He could never have 
 been one of the ' hall-marked young men,' 
 lightly satirised by himself, one of ' the un- 
 impeachable models turned out yearly by 
 the lathe of a systematic tuition ' : his hu- 
 manity and originality would always have 
 been stronger than his education. With a 
 strictly conventional training he might have 
 been more of the man of letters ; he might 
 have been considerably less of the dramatist 
 of life. + In his seventeenth year he was 
 articled to an ecclesiastical architect in 
 Dorchester, and the traces of this apprentice- 
 ship, and of his studies for his profession, 
 are plainly evident in his writing, in the 
 precision with which he describes a building 
 or a neighbourhood, and notes position,
 
 16 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 distance, and proportion. Very probably it 
 strengthened his love of pictorial art, and in- 
 directly had not a little to do with the fact 
 that he comes nearer to having the vision 
 and using the methods of a painter than 
 any other novelist one could name. His 
 work, too, gave him roving errands about 
 the county — when he stored another kind 
 of capital than professional skill — for to his 
 master had been entrusted the restoration 
 of many of the old South Dorsetshire 
 churches. 
 
 But architecture did not, even in those 
 early days, absorb all his thoughts and 
 energies, and for the next four years he was 
 a diligent student of literature, more especi- 
 ally of classics and theology. At the age - 
 of twenty Mr. Hardy came to London, to 
 pursue his profession, and there attached 
 himself to the modern Gothic school, work- 
 ing under the distinguished architect Sir 
 Arthur Blomfield, and helping him in the 
 restoration of several churches in the neigh-
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST 17 
 
 bourhood of London. Sir Arthur Blomfield 
 is painter as well as architect, and probably 
 his influence over his pupil was still more 
 in the direction of fostering his love of art 
 than of training him in design. In 1863, 
 the prize and medal of the Institute of British 
 Architects was awarded to the competitor 
 who wrote, under the motto, ' Tentavi quid 
 ' in congenere possem,' an essay on ' Col- 
 ' oured Brick and Terra Cotta Architecture.' 
 This was Mr. Hardy's first public success, 
 and in the same year he received Sir W. 
 Tite's prize for architectural design. These 
 are all his recorded separate efforts in his 
 early profession, though he continued to 
 pursue it seriously for some years, and the 
 final choice between architecture and litera- 
 ture was probably not made till 1874. 
 
 On his arrival in London he had entered 
 as a student of modern languages at King's 
 College, and side by side with his profession 
 literature was asserting claims on his time 
 and interest. A little paper, ' How I built 
 
 B
 
 18 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 myself a House,' which appeared in 
 Chambers' Journal, in 1865, is probably his 
 first published work/' It is not technical, 
 as might be supposed from its title, but a 
 slight and humorous sketch of the experi- 
 ence of two enthusiastic young house- 
 keepers, with awful warnings as to ex- 
 penses and unexpected happenings in the 
 dangerous amusement of house-building. 
 But the leisure of the years that elapsed 
 between his coming to London and the 
 publication of his first novel was devoted 
 to poetry, not to fiction. There is pro- 
 bably more in this than the mere conven- 
 tional beginning of almost every literary 
 career. Mr. Hardy is first of all a poet, if 
 his other gifts and ambitions sometimes 
 tend to obscure the fact, and though the 
 world has not had much chance of gauging 
 his skill in metrical form. Publishers 
 behaved just as usual, and made no eager 
 move to welcome another young man's 
 verses. The album verse in ' Desperate
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST 19 
 
 Remedies ' is not his only metrical com- 
 position in print, but the magazines were not 
 very hospitable to what consumed the best 
 ardour of Mr. Hardy's mind for several 
 years; and the book of poems that has 
 been so frequently the future prose writer's 
 introduction to the world, in his case mostly 
 remained in manuscript. 
 
 At last he took to novel-writing, and 
 ' Desperate Remedies ' was published an- 
 onymously, by Messrs. Tinsley, in 187 1. 
 Though it had its share of abuse, its recep- 
 tion was such as to place him within the 
 first outposts of success. But his years of 
 patient training, and his observant youth in 
 Wessex, had soon a finer result. By one of 
 the unaccountable leaps, some backward, 
 some forward, which have marked Mr. 
 Hardy's progress, this vigorous but some- 
 what awkward story was followed, a year 
 after, by another, which for beauty of work- 
 manship and charm he has never surpassed, 
 'Under the Greenwood Tree.' 'A Pair of
 
 20 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 Blue Eyes ' appeared in 1873. It was not, 
 however, till the practically unqualified 
 success in 1874 of 'Far from the Madding 
 Crowd,' which appeared in Comhill in that 
 year, that Mr. Hardy's career seemed to 
 be finally settled. Five years later this 
 novel, perhaps, not even excepting 'Tess,' 
 the most popular of his works, was 
 dramatised by himself. A version of it, 
 written in collaboration with Mr. Comyns 
 Carr, in which occur some modifications of 
 the plot, was performed, in February 1882, 
 at the Prince of Wales's Theatre, Liverpool, 
 Miss Marion Terry playing Bathsheba, that 
 part being taken by Mrs. Bernard Beere 
 when it appeared on the London stage, at 
 the Globe, in May of the same year. His 
 only other dramatised work is ' The Three 
 Wayfarers,' based on ' The Three Strangers,' 
 one of the ' Wessex Tales,' performed, with 
 four other one act plays, at Terry's Theatre 
 in June 1893. 
 
 Since his renunciation of architecture his
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST 21 
 
 literary life has not been spent in London. 
 Returning to Wessex he finally settled at 
 Dorchester, where he now lives. Mr. 
 Hardy's developments may yet be many, 
 and only one thing can be foreseen with any 
 degree of certainty, that Wessex will still be 
 the stage where his dramas will play. Not 
 only has he old memories to fall back on 
 and suggest his scenes and stories : by 
 choice, all his present working days are 
 spent where Wessex cannot be out of sight 
 or mind. Just below him, on the north, lies 
 the Frome Valley, with glimpses of the wild 
 heath country beyond ; towards the sea, 
 Blackdown with his namesake's monument 
 stands conspicuous to the right ; nearer on 
 the same side are the great ramparts of 
 Mai-Dun, and in front the rolling downs of 
 1 The Trumpet Major.' 
 
 There he has written with regularity, but 
 not too prolifically, the order of his works, 
 after those already named, being, ' The Hand 
 of Ethelberta,' 1876; 'The Return of the
 
 22 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 Native/ 1878 ; ' The Trumpet Major,' 1880 ; 
 'A Laodicean,' 1881 ; 'Two on a Tower,' 
 1882 ; 'The Mayor of Casterbridge,' 1886; 
 ' The Woodlanders,' 1886-7 \ ' Wessex 
 Tales,' 1888; 'A Group of Noble Dames,' 
 1891; 'Tess of the DTJrbervilles,' 1892; 
 'The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved,' 1892: 
 'Life's Little Ironies,' 1894. Mr. Hardy 
 has been also an infrequent contributor 
 to periodical literature in other directions 
 than fiction. Among his more notable 
 articles are, one on ' The Dorset Labourer ' 
 in Longman's Magazine of July 1893 — an 
 interesting commentary on the material 
 for the Wessex novels, and an obituary 
 notice of the Rev. William Barnes, 
 the Dorset poet, which appeared in the 
 Athenceum of October 16, 1886. Barnes 
 was his near neighbour — two fields only 
 divide his house from the rectory of Winter- 
 borne Came — and the difference in age, 
 temperament, and point of view, did nothing 
 to prevent a warm friendship between the
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST 23 
 
 two men who, each in his own way, have 
 finely interpreted the life and character of 
 the county they have both loved so well. 
 Dorset has been singularly fortunate in 
 the loyalty as in the gifts of two such 
 sons.
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A 
 NOVELIST 
 
 II
 
 Ill 
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A 
 
 NOVELIST 
 
 ii 
 
 The republication of ' Desperate Remedies ' 
 in 1892 gave a new and wider circulation 
 to Mr. Hardy's earliest work of fiction. 
 Markedly unlike most of the later books 
 in its surface tones, the difference is yet 
 mainly one of season rather than of climate; 
 and as the story contains the germs of al- 
 most every idea, talent, and tendency to be 
 found in his work since its appearance, it 
 is as worthy of close attention as some of 
 the better books. 
 
 ' Desperate Remedies ' was published
 
 28 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 anonymously in 187 1. On its title-page it 
 bore a quotation from Scott, a manifesto in 
 defence of its construction rather than a 
 motto, — ' Though an unconnected course of 
 adventures is what most frequently occurs in 
 nature, yet the province of the romance- 
 writer being artificial, there is more required 
 from him than a mere compliance with the 
 simplicity of reality.' And indeed he has 
 selected, arranged, and adapted the events 
 with much thoroughness. It is a story of 
 plot and sensation, the incidents precisely 
 adjusted to a complicated plan, workman- 
 like rather than attractive, the novel of one 
 who, making up his mind to construct an 
 elaborate plot, straightway did it without 
 bungling or breakdown, but not with the 
 convincing success of an equally complicated 
 story of sensation, say, by Wilkie Collins. 
 A feature, or perhaps, a freak of the book, 
 its divisions into sections headed, 'The 
 Events of Thirty Years,' ' The Events of a 
 Fortnight,' ' The Events of a Day and a
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST 29 
 
 Night,' and so on, has a look of being part 
 of the painstaking plan. Whatever its inten- 
 tion, it serves but a slight purpose, though 
 it marks a precision which Mr. Hardy after- 
 wards transferred, and with greater effect, 
 from time to place. It is also a novel of 
 character ; there are no puppets, though 
 some of the more important personages are 
 a little rigid in their movements. A Wessex 
 story, the rustic humours and humourists, to 
 many readers the most prominent feature of 
 Mr. Hardy's tales, are here already, and 
 Clerk Crickett, the ' kind of Bowdlerised 
 rake,' is surpassed by few of the later wits. 
 
 The frankness of conception and of lan- 
 guage, more or less a determined purpose 
 all along, began in this earliest novel. The 
 story turns largely on the secret breach of 
 the social code of morality by a young and 
 inexperienced woman, who afterwards came 
 to such a position as made the discovery of 
 her secret dangerous; on her contrivance 
 to introduce her unrecognising son into her
 
 30 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 employment; and her resolve to effect a 
 marriage between him and the daughter of 
 a later, honourable, and disappointed lover. 
 The design, joined in by Manston, the son, 
 who has already a wife, leads to deep plot- 
 ting and eventually to murder. Such a 
 story can hardly be called agreeable, but 
 the insistence is on the dramatic action 
 rather than on the sordid detail of the 
 tragedy. In the recent edition there has 
 been considerable verbal revision, for the 
 most part unimportant, the Bowdlerisation 
 of a word or two not being of a character 
 to give any particular interest to the earlier 
 version. The complacency with life and 
 the tragic despair of it that mark most 
 young men's novels are both absent, an 
 austere facing of its ills taking their place. 
 In the melodramatic parts even, a firm intel- 
 lectual grip of life is felt, and the philosophy 
 not dramatised into situations or characters, 
 if a trifle wordily expressed, is firsthand and 
 never flimsy. A Nature painter of the rarest
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST 31 
 
 kind he proved himself from the beginning, 
 and the love of picturesque circumstance 
 which has inspired some of his greatest 
 moments, as it has also allied itself on less 
 fortunate occasions to melodrama, is already 
 a feature. In a story where sorrow and evil 
 assert themselves in their full power, and 
 with a forbidding aspect, the little scene is 
 gratefully remembered where, on Cytherea's 
 wedding-day with Manston, she and Spring- 
 rove touch hands and bid farewell with the 
 flowing stream between them. "ThlTstyle is 
 vigorous and ambitious, but it is also that 
 of a bookish man whose pen has not gained 
 agility. It is a style that Mr. Hardy re- 
 adopts from time to time, suggesting con- 
 scientious drill more than spontaneous exer- 
 cise; it is the language of dissertation and 
 exposition rather than of art. 
 
 Such is the novel Mr. Hardy first sent out 
 to the world, for the material in it, for its 
 throughness and grip, remarkable in itself, 
 but specially interesting read in the light 
 
 /1
 
 32 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 of the later work. For a first book by an 
 anonymous writer, it was not received 
 badly. Indeed the Saturday welcomed it 
 with enthusiasm. It was dubbed 'unplea- 
 sant ' but ' powerful ' by another leading 
 organ of literary opinion, the reviewer being 
 a little puzzled as to the sex of the writer, 
 though he hoped it was not by ' an English 
 lady.' For a certain outspokenness of lan- 
 guage it was duly reproved. 
 
 ' Under the Greenwood Tree ' is called on 
 its title-page, 'A Rural Picture of the Dutch 
 School,' and there is in it a good deal of the 
 vigorous trust in homely detail that reminds 
 one of Jan Steen and Van Ostade. But the 
 transcript has been made by a poet's hand. 
 To not a few the book appears as Mr. 
 Hardy's surest claim to recognition in an- 
 other age, inasmuch as it is least coloured 
 by the dusty complexion of ours. All but 
 flawless in workmanship, its tone and hu- 
 mour are of the kindliest. Nature and human 
 nature, in sleepy woodland hamlets, are
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST 33 
 
 seen, not with the vagueness of a roving 
 lover of the picturesque, but with an eye 
 that has noted how the light falls upon the 
 leaves at all the hours and all the seasons, 
 and read the minutest meaning of the smiles 
 that play round rustic lips. You may put it 
 on the shelf with the ' Vicar of Wakefield ' 
 and Walton and c As You Like It,' but its 
 piquancy will make it best neighbour to the 
 last. It is an untraditional idyll : Arcadia 
 with a savour. 
 
 For all the intimacy with rural habit and 
 character it reveals, Mr. Hardy is not 
 amongst the literalists. 'Under the Green- 
 wood Tree ' is the picture of a mood, of the 
 conscious glee and the unconscious humour 
 of country life, a mood of which the sum is 
 large enough, counted by the broken experi- 
 ences of it in every country heart, but which 
 needs, as well as a light hand to paint it, an 
 eye that can divert itself for a time from yester- 
 day's pain and the view of to-morrow's drud- 
 gery, and see it as it exists to each, at happy 
 c
 
 34 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 times, the sole mood of all the world. The 
 story bubbles over with pure fun; its romance 
 is as fresh and gentle as a spring morning. 
 It is the comedy of country life meeting its 
 lighter poetry. The shadows lying outside 
 the sunny spot never obtrude. You can't 
 make a tragedy out of Fancy's ' I like Dick, 
 1 and I love him ; but how poor and mean a 
 1 man looks in the rain, with no umbrella, 
 1 and wet through ! ' and you needn't out 
 of ' those beautiful eyes of hers — too refined 
 1 and beautiful for a tranter's wife ; but, 
 1 perhaps, not too good.' And the shadow 
 creeps no nearer among the leaves and 
 scents of Yalbury wood and the sunshine 
 of simple hearts, amid the buzz of cottage 
 mirth and the twang of fiddles at Christmas 
 merry-makings. 
 
 'A Pair of Blue Eyes' is not a Wessex 
 novel, the scene lying in a remote Cornish 
 parish and in London. Sophisticated folks 
 play parts in it, and play them indifferently. 
 It holds its place in readers' affections by its
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST 35 
 
 strange love story, by the vagaries of the 
 heroine, and the genuine unaccented pathos 
 of the end. Elfride is one of Mr. Hardy's 
 special maidens. Whatever her deservings, 
 she is remembered by readers as she is 
 treated by her creator, with the tenderness 
 called out by beautiful things that die young. 
 A charming child, who 'says things worthy 
 1 of a French epigrammatist, and acts like a 
 ' robin in a greenhouse,' she has the vari- 
 ableness of a subtle nature and the promise 
 of a woman of passion • she fibs, makes 
 terrible mistakes, and yet deserves somehow 
 by her nature, if not by her acts, the love 
 of the three men who mourned over her in 
 the Luxellian family vault. It is a story of 
 memorable scenes, and with much beauty 
 in the circumstances and the setting. The 
 tragic note of the battle with the inevitable in 
 nature is first struck here with a deep sound. 
 Technically less elaborate, it is still, from a 
 craftsman's point of view, a great advance 
 on ' Desperate Remedies,' to which it seems
 
 36 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 naturally the successor, and it stirs one's 
 sympathies much more readily and lastingly. 
 Turning back now to 'A Pair of Blue 
 Eyes,' its most interesting feature is seen to 
 be the foreshadowing in it of Angel Clare's 
 part in Tess's tragedy. Knight, though a 
 priggish London reviewer, is a robuster, if 
 less picturesque figure than Angel : but their 
 point of view is the same. Personally 
 Knight had a better case for himself, but 
 according to social conventions, in spite of 
 Elfride's fibs, he had less cause for his 
 prudish cruelty. The situation wants the 
 tragic circumstances that occur in ' Tess ' ; 
 otherwise it is the same : the casting off of 
 the warmest love by a man who finds that 
 an earlier story, into which he did not enter, 
 contains what does not fit in with his con- 
 ventional code for the ideal of womankind. 
 
 Perhaps ' Far from the Madding Crowd ' 
 is still, as it was for long, the most popular 
 of Mr. Hardy's stories, in spite of the fact 
 that it exemplifies all the qualities, though
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST 37 
 
 not all of them at their strongest, by which 
 he has given offence. When it appeared in 
 book form, his name for the first time on a 
 title-page, his recognition as a writer of un- 
 usual vigour was immediate \ it was a recog- 
 nition, nevertheless, modified by so much 
 criticism, that the succeeding books had still 
 to fight their way. It presents a greater 
 variety of moods than any of the others. The 
 range and room of English country life for 
 purposes of fiction he first proved in this 
 story, which is at once comedy, tragedy, 
 idyll, rustic chronicle, and shepherd's calen- 
 dar. Into no other book has he put such 
 close and lavish work ■ none is more viva 
 cious, more characteristic ; it contains the 
 essence of his genius. In reading it first of 
 all — and it has introduced Mr. Hardy to 
 many — you have the feeling of crossing or 
 climbing something before reaching the level 
 of full appreciation, a sensation to some ex- 
 tent, of course, marking every first acquaint- 
 ance with a writer of originality. The feeling
 
 38 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 is not experienced in the same degree in 
 any of the other novels. ( His individuality 
 lies in his ' humour,' to use the word in its 
 older sense, in his love for the unexpected, 
 s the impulsive, the vivid, in human nature 
 and incident, in his delight in upsetting the 
 minor proprieties, and making mock of the 
 solemnity of petty conventions. Bathsheba's 
 prank of sending the valentine to Boldwood 
 is typical of this somewhat impish temper. 
 His ' humour ' is what those critics have in 
 mind who accuse him of a want of taste. 
 There is something bristling in Mr. Hardy ; 
 there is little or no placidity ; and not only in 
 his defiant temper do you feel this?S His 
 very virtues add to the effect, the vividness 
 of his pictures, the complex interest of his 
 characters, the heat of the emotions he ex- 
 presses. He is always awake and strenuous ; 
 there is hardly a comfortable sleepy corner 
 in one of his stories. Perhaps that is why 
 he jars on some nerves, though his holding 
 the conventions as mostly of little account
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST 39 
 
 has been his chief cause of offence. In his 
 novels the middle classes have their due 
 share of representation, and I do not call to 
 mind any passage in which he has gibed at 
 them, or treated them otherwise than honour- 
 ably. But he is not their novelist. The 
 calm orderliness, the prudence, the respecta- 
 bility — the conditions by which they keep 
 their comfortable position — are not the quali- 
 ties he finds most interesting. Bathsheba 
 so typifies his unconventionally in minor 
 matters that ' Far from the Madding Crowd ' 
 is an excellent starting-point for making his 
 nearer acquaintance, apart from the fact that 
 it represents his powers at their full compass, 
 though not at their mellowest. 
 
 In 'The Hand of Ethelberta,' a London 
 and a Wessex story, light satire is the pre- 
 vailing note. If the Society scenes are not 
 admirable, they, at least, provide the contrast 
 that makes the piquant comedy in the his- 
 tory of the heroine. Ethelberta is the 
 daughter of a highly respectable family 
 
 y
 
 40 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 butler, shoved up into an equality with the 
 great folks whom her father waits on, by her 
 graces and talents more even than by her 
 marriage with an aristocratic minor who died 
 in their honeymoon. For the sake of a 
 numerous band of lowly brothers and sisters 
 she fights for position, and lives in a per- 
 petual conspiracy to hide or disguise their 
 existence and the other fiostscenia vitae for 
 the sake of that same position. The much 
 sought lady of many suitors, her difficulties 
 never give her heart a chance, and she ends 
 as the wife of an Old noble rake. The 
 bitterness of the facts is hardly expressed in 
 the tone, and the underside of the beautiful 
 and vivacious Ethelberta, a dogged family 
 faithfulness, keeps her history wholesome. 
 A very lively story is made out of the shifts 
 of the household which she rules as mistress, 
 and where brother Joey is page-boy, and sis- 
 ters Gwendoline and Cornelia are cook and 
 housemaid, and out of the contrasts of her 
 two lives, one spent in regulating the minutest
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVi. 
 
 details of the life of her humble family, 
 other in charming London drawing-rooms b, 
 her poems and wit. The Anglebury rustics, 
 as well as the Chickerel family, supply 
 humorous by-play, and the London scenes 
 some smart gibes at fashionable frigidities. 
 Here, as in ' A Pair of Blue Eyes,' the weary 
 strife against the senseless class feeling in 
 English society is dramatised, but true to the 
 "note struck in the sub-title, ' A Comedy in 
 Chapters/ and to the essentially practical 
 nature of the heroine, neither this struggle 
 nor the worldly marriage that ends it is pre- 
 sented in a tragic light. On the whole it is 
 an amusing story, rising occasionally to brilli- 
 ancy. Wherever the scenes are not merely 
 conventional they are full of vigour : the 
 journey of the Honourable Edgar and Sol 
 Chickerel, builder, together into Wessex, 
 each determined to prevent a mesalliance, 
 the one of a noble brother to a beautiful 
 low-born adventuress, the other of a beloved, 
 if remotely understood, sister, to an old rakish
 
 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 jcrat, candidly uncivil fellow-travellers, 
 ompelled by desperate necessity to act to- 
 gether even to the joint frying of bacon in 
 their forced stopping-place, is one of the 
 finest bits of narrative in all the stories. 
 
 Then came a book which gathered up the 
 undertones of much of Mr. Hardy's previous 
 work. But in ' The Return of the Native ' 
 they are no longer undertones, but swelled, 
 concentred, and urged into burning, tense, 
 and reverberating expression. They are 
 never long absent from the later work, but 
 their fullest articulation is in this book that 
 misses just criticism and nice valuation by its 
 tremendous appeal to sympathies which are 
 either knit in with the very fibres of life, or 
 remote, or non-existent, (it is a tragedy of 
 temperaments ; it is likewise one in which 
 Nature and man have that rare but always 
 fateful meeting where they wholly blend or 
 endlessly struggle./} Sea and moorland are 
 the everlasting plains where such meetings 
 take place, where Nature aggressively pits
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST 43 
 
 herself against man, or receives his fullest 
 allegiance ; and never have the battle and 
 the blending been more hauntingly pictured 
 than in this story of Egdon Heath. The 
 great struggle of Lear on the same wild land 
 is more of an incident in another kind of 
 tragedy. Here the heath has a personality, 
 a temperament, far more forcible than any 
 of its dwellers ; it is a brooding, pervasive 
 presence acting on them always, stinging 
 them to revolt, encircling and hushing them. 
 One forgets willingly enough the incidents 
 of the story, to remember it only as the ex- 
 pression of the dark, resisting, untameable 
 mood of nature, set to a human tune. 
 
 Society has been left far behind, which 
 never means with Mr. Hardy — or any one 
 else not tainted with literary west-end pro- 
 vincialism — the absence in the characters of 
 complex human motives. Outer and inner 
 experiences are by no means always coex- 
 tensive. One of the principal actors is a son 
 of the soil, who has left Paris and worldly
 
 44 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 success to find something better to do than 
 selling trinkets in a suffering world, and who 
 comes back to the heath to find his work, 
 which he does, first in furze-cutting, and 
 eventually in preaching. (The other is an 
 exotic, perfervid woman, craving the light 
 and glitter of the outer world, with an ori- 
 ginal brain and a mean soul, made tragic by 
 her terribly alien circumstances.) They are 
 not ordinary characters, but they are as likely 
 to be found on a heath as elsewhere, and 
 when they are, a tragedy is in the making. 
 ' The Return of the Native ' is th^old tale 
 of the new, the slight, the vulgar, struggling 
 against the old, the strong, the real ; of pas- 
 sion warring, now against passion and now 
 against thought ; of ambition and idealism 
 in their ever futile striving, j Round about 
 like wild-flowers growing in blithe confidence 
 on the edge of a roaring torrent, are the 
 quaint humours, the unthinking repose, of 
 Grandfer Cantle, of Christian, and the mum- 
 mers. It is a book of striking incidents and
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST 45 
 
 powerful dramatic situations, but it is easy 
 to find blemishes and incongruities in it. 
 ' Wuthering Heights,' though it outrages hu- 
 man probabilities far more in its characters, 
 has, in the simplicity and boldness of its con- 
 struction, a great advantage over this kindred 
 book. Both are poems rather than novels ; 
 but 'The Return of the Native' has the 
 ambition to be completely a novel, too, and 
 the narrative is not always on a level with the 
 spirit enwrapping it — a spirit that were more 
 fittingly set to a wild metre and music. The 
 youthful mood of the world was reflected 
 in ' Under the Greenwood Tree ' ; f ' The 
 Return of the Native ' reflects, not the aged, 
 perhaps, which may be less sensitive and 
 gentler, but rather maturity, with its emotions 
 at their strongest, and its eyes at their 
 full courage, looking unshrinkingly on the 
 struggle at its darkest and bitterest} Mr. 
 Hardy has written cleverer novels, ana novels 
 where the ills of life have had more pathetic 
 expression. But by its poetic force and its
 
 46 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 conquering spirit over those whom it touches 
 at all, it contains the finest of his work. 
 
 In ' The Trumpet Major ' you descend to 
 a cooler air. Tragedy keeps off, or you see 
 but a gentle shadow of it as John vanishes 
 into the darkness, a smile on his lips and a 
 tear in his eye for sweet Anne Garland. 
 Virtue, in the shape of as fine a hero of 
 chivalry as ever sat at the Table Round, is 
 not rewarded; but that is too much of a 
 commonplace to make a moan over, and 
 the tone of the story is as clear and ringing 
 as the notes from John's own trumpet. 
 Love is still the lord of all, and a most 
 arbitrary, inconsequent lord, too, with 
 whom it 's no use arguing, to whom it 's no 
 use showing certificates of character, or 
 records of service. And really, when he 
 favours Bob Loveday, who has a word to 
 say against him ? That half-suppressed fun 
 and that rare humour of the eyes that Mr. 
 Hardy reveals every now and again, with 
 lapses into grimness, from ' Under the
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST 47 
 
 Greenwood Tree' to ' A Few Crusted 
 Characters,' play round every scene and 
 character in this book, in a kindly mocking 
 commentary, in satire without a sting. 
 
 In this, as in the shorter stories where 
 another age is pictured, there is no insist- 
 ence on detail by way of proving historical 
 acquaintance with the epoch ; but the stir- 
 ring days when Boney was nightly expected 
 to land his army on our coast in flat-bot- 
 tomed boats, and rustics drilled with pikes 
 and hurdle-sticks and cabbage-stumps on 
 the Downs, are present to our eyes and 
 ears. Unintentionally, and therefore the 
 more vividly, it is an unforgetable page in 
 history. Of all the groups in the novels, the 
 mill folks, the kindly miller, the inconse- 
 quent Mrs. Garland, maidy Anne, John and 
 Bob, are those we are on most familiar 
 terms with. They are our veritable neigh- 
 bours ; we have none in our street or parish 
 we know better. 
 
 • The Trumpet Major ' is the tersest of the
 
 48 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 longer stories, the fullest of nervous vigour, 
 the most literary. The reviewer Knight in 
 ' A Pair of Blue Eyes,' says : ' It requires a 
 ' talented omission of your real thoughts to 
 ' make a novel popular.' Whether that be 
 so or not, it requires some such omission to 
 make a novel a perfect work of art, in the 
 narrower sense of the term. A novelist in 
 a personal mood, confessing himself to the 
 world, or evangelising it, may be fulfilling 
 the greatest in him; but full revelation of 
 emotion and opinion tends to diffuseness, 
 and to the ups and downs of style and 
 arrangement coincident with the swell and 
 the exhaustion of the emotions expressed. 
 It is not, therefore, in ' Tess ' that Mr. 
 Hardy shows himself most of a practised 
 and perfect craftsman, but in the stories 
 revealing fewer layers of his mind, and 
 made of material to be more coolly dealt 
 with, in ' Under the Greenwood Tree,' in 
 some of the shorter stories, and especially in 
 1 The Trumpet Major.'
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST 49 
 
 If Mr. Hardy's progress were to be traced 
 weather-chartwise, here would occur a great 
 depression. The next two novels are in- 
 ferior to the rest of his work, and one of 
 them only in a passage or two recalls the 
 writer's real powers. Dulness is the last 
 quality to be associated with Mr. Hardy; 
 but ' A Laodicean ' is dull. It begins excel- 
 lently, and the episode of the baptism in the 
 Methodist chapel, where the courage of the 
 lady of the manor is not equal to the strain 
 put upon it by devotion to her pious father's 
 memory, is piquant and full of promise. 
 But Paula, the least charming of ail the 
 vacillating heroines, is forcible enough to 
 give tone to the book ; and the central fact 
 about her being her sense of the precarious- 
 ness of her social position as parve?iue lady 
 of the manor, the tone is one of extreme 
 rigidity. As worldly as Ethelberta, she has 
 none of Ethelberta's fire and dash, nor the 
 excuse of her desperate fortunes. A Wessex 
 and a society novel, it has the excellencies 
 
 D
 
 50 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 of neither. The tortuous love-story is not 
 very interesting ; De Stancy is an unwhole- 
 some bore \ the constant click of the excit- 
 able telegraph and the chase of the lovers, 
 all at cross purposes, across the Continent, 
 grow wearisome. Yet there is good and 
 close work in it : indeed, it has the appear 
 ance of having been written in an industri- 
 ous fit of unowned exhaustion. And it 
 could not be Mr. Hardy's without being 
 redeemed in some way from mere common- 
 place. It has an interesting side, this ' Story 
 of To-day.' The substitution of modern 
 energy and brains, expressed in money, for 
 the old feudal prestige, is the idea at the 
 bottom of it. Brains and wealth have con- 
 quered. The engineer takes possession of 
 the De Stancy castle and lands, and be- 
 queathes them to his daughter. Not only 
 is there a De Stancy ready to love her with 
 a fierce devotion and to give her the only 
 thing she lacks ; but the very castle has a 
 personality. It saps her modern faith, and
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST 51 
 
 rouses longings in her for that old romance 
 that money cannot buy. His own castle 
 walls, no longer his, fight on De Stancy's 
 side : the De Stancy ghosts are the real 
 rivals in her heart to Somerset's claims. 
 Indeed, so strong is this that the walls have 
 to be burnt to the ground before you are 
 fully assured of her loyalty to the architect 
 hero. The castle is the most interesting 
 character in the book. 
 
 Not much above ' A Laodicean ' in general 
 excellence, and of slighter build, 'Two on 
 a Tower ' has at least a charm which the 
 other lacks. The situation is somewhat 
 morbidly unreal, but it provides a few 
 excellent situations. Besides, the characters 
 — they are few — draw out one's sympathies 
 more than do the frigid ones of the preced- 
 ing book. Lady Constantine and Swithin 
 are not rustics^ but their isolation and 
 peculiar temperaments have stripped them 
 of conventionality. The lonely woman 
 suffering from neglect and the cruel re-
 
 52 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 strictions forced on her life, feeding on her 
 own heart till she falls in love with the 
 much younger Swithin, whose emotions are 
 of the most rudimentary kind, and whose 
 intellectual interests are of the most absorb- 
 ing, is the victim of one of those ironical 
 situations in which life delights, according 
 to the observation of Mr. Hardy. The plot 
 is ingenious : the personages are extricated 
 from, or entangled in, the situations of diffi- 
 culty with fine skill • and if the book is, on 
 the whole, thin and disappointing, and if 
 there are few or no great passages, there is, 
 at least, Swithin. Never has science, noto- 
 riously the most disinterested of human 
 pursuits, been so attractively personified as 
 in the beautiful young astronomer. Rarely 
 has its cool, clear temper, its truthful spirit, 
 and its limitations of sympathy, had a 
 keener-sighted presentment. 
 
 The line 01 progress which had run down, 
 now shoots up again with rapid decision in 
 the novel published four years later than
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST 53 
 
 1 Two on a Tower,' ' The Mayor of Caster- 
 bridge.' With less of terse vigour than 
 'The Trumpet Major,' and one or two 
 characters, Lucetta and Farfrae, shaky in 
 their reality, it is/yet strong in human in- 
 terest, dramatic in its incidents, and in the 
 rise and progress of its action. No unreality 
 clings round the Mayor, who is as living to 
 us as if we had been browbeaten by him, or 
 been the recipients of his large capricious 
 favours. In this story of ' the life and 
 death of a man of character,' the central 
 figure dwarfs, with intention, the rest of the 
 personages, and to some extent the events, 
 not from any inhabitual slightness of the 
 incidents, or from weakness in the characters 
 in general. J Henchard was made by nature 
 to be the principal feature and obstacle in 
 his own and his neighbour's views, and his 
 biographer expresses the fact. He plays the 
 overmastering part, tempered by human 
 fragility and instability, that the heath does 
 in ' The Return of the Native ' and the
 
 54 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 woods in ' The Woodlanders,' a part that 
 Mr. Hardy rarely assigns to his human per- 
 sonages. His personality so affects the 
 course and complexion of the story as to 
 make its construction worth the closest ex- 
 amination. His contradictory emotions, his 
 savagery and sentiment, each have their 
 harmonic counterparts in the incidents : 
 the lurid ones, like the selling of the wife at 
 Weydon Priors and the skimmity-ride, stand- 
 ing out strong against the lonely death of 
 the Mayor, and thefquiet walk and conduct 
 of the still-natured Elizabeth-Jane.| 
 
 ' The Woodlanders ' must be placed just 
 / after Mr, Hardy's greater novels, ' Far from 
 the Madding Crowd,' ' The Return of the 
 Native,' ' The Trumpet Major,' ' The Mayor 
 of Casterbridge,' and ' Tess.' In all his 
 best work there is something recognisable 
 beyond the story, a poetic idea or inten- 
 tion of which the narrative serves as illustra- 
 tion and commentary. The idea or inten- 
 tion never fails in greatness, but sometimes
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST 55 
 
 the illustration halts, and this is truer of ' The 
 Woodlanders ' than of ' The Return of the 
 Native.' For its description of country 
 life, and for its central conception — which 
 may be interpreted as the effect of the 
 woodlands on their own children, refining 
 by their isolation and beauty Giles and 
 Marty, and on aliens, driving Felice 
 to revolt and selfish passion — the book 
 deserves a high place. But Grace's story 
 comes as a weaker note. There is some- 
 thing in her earlier character, at least, that 
 does not answer to Mr. Hardy's touch. He 
 is in fuller sympathy with less conventional, 
 more passionate, more vivacious natures. 
 The taint of fineladyism is about her and 
 her story : and gentle satire would have been 
 the most effective treatment for her troubles, 
 arising out of the differences between her 
 home-surroundings and her education. Such 
 little difficulties, made so much of in life, give 
 a novelist his chance of teaching a sense of 
 proportion. Fitzpiers, too, is not one of his
 
 56 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 author's happy presentations of intellectual 
 men. He talks more insufferably than he 
 acts. The quiet of the woods rouses despair 
 and revolt in Felice : it only breeds conceit 
 in the doctor. In spite of weaknesses, the 
 book claims our sympathies strongly in other 
 directions, and many of its descriptive pas- 
 sages, Midsummer Eve in the woods, for 
 instance, Sherton in the cider season, the 
 barking of the trees, the view from Rubdon 
 Hill over the blue apple valley, are of a kind 
 to cling to the memory as do only a few 
 of the scenes that have met our bodily eyes. 
 ' Tess ' has been pushed to the front 
 because of the problems it deals with, but 
 perhaps the place assigned to it is the right 
 one, for, judged by the strength of its appeal 
 to human sympathies, it is doubtless his 
 greatest book. ' Sent out in all sincerity 
 ' of purpose,' its author said of it in his first 
 preface, but sincerity seems hardly to express 
 the intense and burning earnestness with 
 which his championship of Tess is filled.
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST 57 
 
 This very earnestness has shaken his hand 
 now and again, and prevented an idyll of 
 singular beauty, a tragedy of force enough 
 to drive complacency out of the smuggest, 
 from being a complete artistic success. Its 
 greatness is proved by its lovers mostly for- 
 getting its defects in their memory of the 
 whole. Only in summoning a judicial mood 
 do they call to mind that there are impro- 
 babilities in the story — and Angel's proposal 
 to Izz to go with him to Brazil is not a slight 
 one ; why, if he wished to ' rule his future 
 domesticities himself, instead of kissing the 
 pedagogic rod of convention,' didn't he go 
 and fetch Tess ? Then the drivelling John 
 Durbeyfield drivels a little too much, and 
 Tess and Angel talk too big. Very likely a 
 definitive edition of the book is wanted. It 
 may be a matter of question whether the 
 murder, or the madness its cause, or the 
 hanging its consequence, be strictly neces- 
 sary. It is a book that holds both cheeks 
 ready for the smiting of the little critic, as
 
 58 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 do not a few of the great books of the world, 
 till tradition has raised a fence of reverence 
 about them, and they become fetishes. But, 
 in no carping mood, one must own that, apart 
 from the central figure, it is poorer than any 
 of the other great novels in strong presenta- 
 tions of character, as it is richer, .or, at least 
 subtler, in its interpretation of Nature. 
 
 Mr. Hardy meant the book to be a battle- 
 ground, and it has been so. Had he merely 
 appealed to sentiment, omitted the violent 
 acts of the end, and made claims for Tess's 
 loveableness, not for her virtue, he might 
 have carried all his readers with him. Many 
 would have been tender-hearted enough to 
 be sorry for Tess, who treat her author's 
 insistence on her purity either as an outrage 
 or a quibble. He preferred to make war. 
 The omission of the murder and its con- 
 sequences would have left the problem 
 stated, certainly, of the woman undergoing 
 her undue share of suffering ; but Mr. Hardy 
 does not feel his business stop at the state-
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST 59 
 
 ment of problems. He gives their working- 
 out in individual lives. ( First he shows 
 Tess as grievously wronged, and then how 
 such wrong may be, by the meekest natures, 
 thrown back with awful violence in the world's 
 face, a fact worth exemplifying at the cost 
 of readers' feelings^ 
 
 The chief cause of offence besides the 
 sub-title { A Pure Woman,' or rather because 
 of the sub-title, is Tess's return to D'Ur- 
 berville. It has been said to be improbable. 
 It has also been said to prove her impurity. 
 Surely here Mr. Hardy was pointing to one 
 of the great facts of life which ethics are 
 bound to face, a fact neither moral nor 
 immoralYthat the human will has limits of 
 vitality, which means limits of resistance, 
 that, only let the struggle be terrible enough A 
 for any individual, he will give in. The 
 power of resistance varies infinitely in weak 
 and strong, but so does the strength of the 
 attack ; and a sensitive nature has less 
 chance of victory than a stolid one.J The
 
 60 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 surrender — in the virtuous chiefly physical — 
 may mean, in fortunate cases, death, but it 
 may mean, unless suicide be resorted to, a 
 continuance of exhausted life, in which cir- 
 cumstances easily win. And saints are 
 subject in like manner, if not in like degree, 
 as sinners, to this law of human limitation, 
 which is as inevitable as the coming on of 
 old age, and has its examples beyond w T hat 
 are known as the temptations of life. Every 
 man who has given up, for weariness, the 
 ideals of his youth, has experienced this 
 mastery of the spirit by the weakness of 
 the body. The surrender took place, it is 
 said, because Tess was pagan, and so the 
 miracle could not happen. But does the 
 miracle give more than the utmost of one's 
 own strength sublimated by imagination or 
 faith ? Fatigue is not a condonation lightly 
 to be put forward for weakness, but it is a 
 cogent plea in that final court of appeal to 
 which only the great suits and struggles of 
 life are carried. \Tess presents the type 
 of woman for generations dear to her con-
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST 61 
 
 demners, ready to merge her whole being 
 in another's, in perfect devotion and trust. 
 The other miserably failed her. Angel's 
 shoddy idealism stuck at one fact, and 
 ignored all the rest of his knowledge of her. 
 There was nothing else in life, and the 
 brothers and sisters prevented death from 
 being an alternative : her domestic affections 
 combined with exhaustion and completed 
 the surrender, such as it was. Then Angel 
 came back — proof she had been lied to. 
 The world returned, but with it the streak of 
 madness in her blood awoke, and she had 
 revenge on what had cursed her life.j 
 
 Condonation or explanation of this kind 
 does not mean the substitution of an easier 
 code. Mr. Hardy has, inferentially, adopted 
 a harder one and a higher one than the 
 world is likely to reach for some time, namely, 
 that the measure of purity, and of the reverse, 
 is in the heart's intentions and desires! His 
 thesis is that Tess's desires were pure : 
 so, therefore, was she.) In estimating the 
 morality of his point of view, it may not be
 
 62 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 unhelpful to read, by way of contrast, the 
 words of a reviewer in a well-considered 
 organ of literary opinion. l Angel Clare 
 is a good man, just and not unduly severe. 
 It is natural that he should discard his wife, 
 not unnatural, considering her sensual at- 
 tractions, that he should come back to her, 
 and not notice the lemon-coloured finery.' 
 Even his hardest critics — save only this one 
 — will recognise here a depth to which he 
 has not sunk. 
 
 Whether he has proved his case or not, 
 /he has, with more courage and chivalry than 
 any other, thrown down his glove in defence 
 of the woman who, be she good or bad, in 
 the particular catastrophe, always pays the 
 whole penalty of suffering and disgrace. He 
 has tilted hard against conventions and the 
 timid silences, and he has made himself be 
 listened to. It is not pity he asks for Tess. 
 Philanthropy has long pitied her. He 
 would draw her ' poor wounded name ' from 
 obloquy, and raise her to the level where 
 the innocency of her intentions gives her a
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST 63 
 
 right to dwell. But if he claims justice 
 rather than pity, he bestows pity on her 
 abundantly himself, and on Tess, more than 
 on any other of his creations, has he poured 
 out his human ityy 
 
 A word as to the shorter stories, dealt with 
 elsewhere. 'Wessex Tales,' a collection of 
 five, contributed to various periodicals from 
 1879 t0 1888, and published in the latter 
 year, includes some work at his best level, 
 { The Three Strangers,' since successfully 
 dramatised, 'The Distracted Preacher,' and 
 'The Withered Arm.' The two others, 
 'Interlopers at the Knap ' and 'Fellow 
 Townsmen,' in greyer tones and minor 
 key, contain some subtle reading of motive 
 and character. 'A Group of Noble 
 Dames,' published in 1891, is a collection 
 of piquant stories made out of some family 
 legends of his county. A storm-bound 
 Field and Antiquarian Club, being unable to 
 visit, as they had planned, the antiquities of 
 the neighbourhood, the local historian tells 
 the tale of ' The First Countess of Wessex,'
 
 64 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 as a substitute for ' the regulation papers on 
 ' deformed butterflies, fossil ox-horns, pre- 
 ' historic dung-mixens, and such like, that 
 ' usually occupied the more serious attention 
 ' of the members.' His example is followed, 
 and the comments of the members con- 
 tribute not a little to the abundant humour 
 which is a feature of the stories, notwith- 
 standing the fact that only two out of the 
 ten can be classed as comedy. The con- 
 versational style in which they are told keeps 
 the atmosphere cool, and gives opportunity 
 for that light mocking tone which Mr. 
 Hardy can adopt with much skill when he 
 would show the humour of serious situations, 
 and which, being neither bitter nor hilarious, 
 has no incongruity in tales of sadness. 
 1 Life's Little Ironies ' — published in March 
 1894 — consists of stories contributed to 
 magazines from 1882 to 1893. ' A Tradition 
 ' of Eighteen Hundred and Four ' which is 
 hardly an ' Irony,' and the bubbling fun of 
 1 A Few Crusted Characters,' the second 
 part of the book, mitigate the gloom of the
 
 THE PROGRESS OF A NOVELIST 65 
 
 rest, which is of every complexion of sorrow, 
 ' The Son's Veto/ and ' For Conscience 
 Sake ' being of the subdued order of 
 ' Fellow Townsmen,' while ' A Tragedy of 
 Two Ambitions ' and ' To Please his Wife ' 
 have more of unrestrained bitterness about 
 them. ' On the Western Circuit ' and ' The 
 Fiddler of the Reels,' two powerful studies 
 of morbid mental and moral conditions, have 
 been followed by another in the same strain, 
 1 An Imaginative Woman,' not yet included 
 in a volume. 
 
 Since 'The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved : A 
 Sketch of a Temperament,' which appeared 
 as a serial in The Illustrated London News in 
 1892, has not yet been published in book 
 form, perhaps we may hope the ending given 
 to the story is not the inevitable one. The 
 weary Jocelyn, tossed to and fro all his life 
 by his homeless emotions, might surely at 
 last find the rest he sought beneath the waves, 
 and not be picked up only to meet a ghastly 
 reminder of one of his many failures to 
 
 E
 
 66 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 realise his dream. The fickle hero, a sculptor, 
 is constancy itself to one never-fading vision 
 in his mind. In his search for its realisation 
 he loves here, there, and everywhere, but the 
 vision flees at the approach of the earthly 
 beloved, and he will make no compromise. 
 Late in life he finds his ideal bound fast in 
 the grandchild of one of his early temporary 
 loves; but his tardy faithfulness is un- 
 rewarded, for his young wife, his beloved, 
 has her own vision, which is not a picture of 
 himself. His conduct in the circumstances 
 is of a generosity the law would frown on. 
 ( The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved ' is full of 
 Mr. Hardy's peculiar sympathy with com- 
 plexities of the soul, and his pity is not ill- 
 spent on the hero, who was no professional 
 breaker of hearts. The roll of his loves has 
 yet something of the comic about it : a 
 shorter one had amply served as manifesta- 
 tion of his temperament. But the ugliness 
 that might lurk in such a story is killed by 
 the conviction forced on us of the reality of 
 Jocelyn's ideal.
 
 STORY WRIGHT

 
 IV 
 
 STORYWRIGHT 
 
 /Oy all Mr. Hardy's gifts, that of making 
 pictures occurs most readily to one's mind 
 at the mention of his name, though in the 
 I conception of some characters, and in the 
 \ ideas at the back of some stories, he has 
 revealed a higher imaginative power. His 
 invention of incidents — both those of the 
 character-revealing order and those that 
 flash on the vision, delights of colour and 
 grouping, complete in themselves — is of the 
 readiest and the most inexhaustible. Nearly 
 all his situations give the idea of actually 
 having been seen rather than having been 
 thought out by their inventor ; our sight of
 
 j THOMAS HARDY 
 
 them is the more vivid. This special talent 
 generally urges its possessor to writing novels 
 of the heroic sword-and-cloak order, but Mr. 
 Hardy has used it mostly for lighting up the 
 life of modern days. His colouring is bold, 
 his detail precise, and grouped with con- 
 scious art; his high lights are emphasised. 
 It is through this emphasis, by which he 
 sometimes attacks rather than persuades the 
 eyes, that he now and again goes wrong.- 
 The commonplace in incident has not often 
 satisfied him ; he loves to drag his person- 
 ages into bizarre situations, where they grow 
 desperate or light-headed, where circum- 
 stances stand to them in strong contrast, 
 mark their isolation, prove their weakness 
 or their strength. In the sequestered vale 
 of Wessex life it is as often the struggles and 
 catastrophes he has presented as the even 
 tenor of rustic ways. 
 
 His plans of structure in his stories are 
 various, but a plan there always is ; there 
 are no stray disjointed sketches. 'Under
 
 STORYWRIGHT 71 
 
 the Greenwood Tree/ ' The Trumpet Major, 
 and ' The Woodlanders ' are not built on a 
 dramatic plan, but they have complete pic- 
 torial unity. In ' Desperate Remedies,' and 
 1 Far from the Madding Crowd,' of much 
 more elaborate mechanism, the separate 
 parts fit in with rare precision. ( The three 
 tragedies, 'The Mayor of Casterbridge,' 'The 
 Return of the Native,' and ' Tess ' are of the 
 traditional five act buildy It would be easy 
 to divide the first into the stages of a regular 
 drama : Act 1. — The sale of the wife at ' 
 Weydon Priors Fair, Henchard's remorse 
 and his vow. iVct 11. — The prosperity con- 
 sequent on his keeping the vow, and on his 
 strenuous ambitions and endeavours, eccen- 
 tricity and weakness, nevertheless, creeping 
 in and paving the way for his troubles in 
 Act in., where Farfrae outrivals him in love 
 and business, the rivalry provoking the worst 
 in the mayor's character, and bringing on 
 the days of adversity and degradation in 
 Act iv. There, having drunk misery to the
 
 72 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 lees, the good in him comes to the surface 
 under the companionship of that still soul 
 Elizabeth-Jane, his chastened happiness, 
 nevertheless, preparing the further wretched- 
 ness in the last act, when Newson returns 
 to steal her affections from him, and when, 
 bereft of love and hope and fortune, he 
 shoulders his workman's tools again, wanders 
 in a circle round and round the spot where 
 his heart still lives, till, wearied out, he lies 
 down in his old servant's hut in Egdon to die. 
 But Mr. Hardy's chief narrative talent 
 does not lie in the integral structure of his 
 stories; but, as has been said, in his rich 
 invention of incident. A host of others 
 will suggest themselves if but a few of those 
 events be named that test character, or are 
 clad in circumstance dramatically and 
 poetically appropriate. Manston watching 
 the fire where his wife is supposed to have 
 been burnt; the rival lovers, Dick and Shinar, 
 at the honey-taking; Oak's prowess at the 
 sheep-shearing, his lady looking on : the
 
 STORYWRIGHT 73 
 
 dulcet piping of his flute to Bathsheba's 
 song, 'the shearers reclining against each 
 1 other as at suppers in the early ages of the 
 1 world ' ; the troopers riding into the stream 
 by Overcombe mill, and catching the miller's 
 cherries in their forage-caps ; the hangman 
 singing to the listening cottagers, while the 
 condemned man sitting in the chimney- 
 corner joins in the ghastly chorus ; Rhoda 
 united again to Farmer Lodge over the 
 strangled body of their son, his wife a 
 stranger standing apart ; Henchard's sale 
 of his wife at the fair; the death of Giles 
 in One Chimney Hut — Grace, for whom he 
 died, on one side, and proud to be there, 
 her erring husband on the other, too peni- 
 tent for his own misdeeds to question her 
 conduct ; Joshua clutching Cornelius's arm 
 in the moment of hesitation that sent their 
 worthless father to his death in the weir ; 
 Tess baptising her child Sorrow, with the 
 audience of sleepy, awe-struck children 
 about her : the homeless Durbeyfield family
 
 74 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 setting up their menage over the vault of 
 their noble ancestors in Kingsbere — a list like 
 this could be multiplied many times ; only 
 it could not illustrate the rare genius shown 
 in the revealing and commenting circum- 
 stances. This, his strongest faculty as a 
 story-teller, points to the fact further exem- 
 plified by his style, that he is a writer not 
 of even perfection but of great passages and 
 great moments. But his moments have 
 occasional power to give the tone to a whole 
 book. One can pick out cases where the 
 incidents are sensational, or too elaborately 
 furnished with picturesque detail, where they 
 overstep the limits of artistic propriety in 
 their determination to besiege the senses 
 and sensibilities. The policemen closing 
 in round Tess at Stonehenge is the type of 
 this offending. But such offences are the 
 defects of a great quality. 
 
 In short stories, made up of distinct inci- 
 dents, as distinguished from sketches, scenes, 
 glimpses and phases of character, Mr. Hardy
 
 STORYWRIGHT 75 
 
 is the master, in England, at least. His 
 triumphs in structure are there. It is not 
 only that he has learnt not to be discursive, 
 where order, clearness, deftness, are the first 
 qualities, where fine cut and finish tell more 
 than wealth of material. His scheme, con- 
 scious or unconscious, has affected his choice 
 of subject, his style, and his tone. Some of 
 the plots of his shorter tales might, of course, 
 have been elaborated into novels, but a 
 further elaboration does not pressingly sug- 
 gest itself. As you look, you feel that a 
 small canvas is the more fitting. He has 
 seen that the chief use of short stories is to 
 skim the surface of life, and when he has 
 struck a tragic note in these, he has re- 
 strained the expression as far as possible. 
 What is food for light satire or laughter, and 
 incidents that draw a sigh rather than a wail, 
 are the materials he moulds best and most 
 frequently into this form. His style is in- 
 separably knit in with the lightness, aptness, 
 and fine proportions of the structure, and
 
 76 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 neither in style nor structure has he reached 
 \ „ a higher level of craftsmanship than in ' A 
 Group of Noble Dames.' 
 
 Mr. Hardy's invention is more, not less, 
 appreciated, if you know something of how 
 he seeks his plots. Many have doubtless 
 been born in his own brain, and the light 
 that reveals the meaning of the story and 
 gives it life, is from his own imagination ; 
 but of Wessex history, as well as Wessex 
 landscape, he has made skilful use. The 
 incidents, memories, and traditions that have 
 given him suggestions, he has probably heard 
 by word of mouth. Legends of Boney's 
 projected invasion, for instance, lie thick 
 about the Wessex Downs, for Lulworth Cove 
 was to be the landing-place, or actually was 
 so, according to 'A Tradition of Eighteen 
 Hundred and Four,' and tales told him as a 
 boy lived vividly in his memory till he made 
 them into ' The Trumpet Major.' But the 
 dry bones of some that he has quickened 
 into life an interested reader can find if he
 
 STORYWRIGHT 77 
 
 takes the trouble to forage in county records. 
 The story of Pa'son Billy Toogood's forget- 
 fulness in ' A Few Crusted Characters,' for 
 instance, is a familiar one to Dorset folks, 
 his original being a famous old rector of 
 Frampton, the Rev. William Butler, friend 
 of the Prince Regent, and notorious and un- 
 tirable fox-hunter. 
 
 The incidents in the story of ' Tess ' are 
 doubtless in the main purely imaginary. 
 They are built, however, on a structure of 
 suggestive facts, namely, on the history of the 
 famous house of Turberville, and the exist- 
 ence, in large numbers, among the Dorset- 
 shire peasantry at the present day, of the 
 descendants of many noble and powerful 
 feudal houses, since early in the last century 
 great alterations having taken place in the 
 ownership of land. The Turbervilles de- 
 scend from Sir Pagan or Sir Payne, a follower 
 of the Conqueror, whose name appears in 
 Battle Abbey Roll. About Henry iii.'s time 
 they became possessed of the manor of Bere,
 
 78 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 where they resided for five hundred years. 
 The site of the old house can still be seen 
 at a farm called The Court, below Woodbury 
 Hill. The county history contains a picture 
 of it. In the Turberville aisle, in the fine old 
 church that stands just above, are the family 
 vaults and the tombs : c canopied, altar- 
 1 shaped, and plain ; their carvings being 
 ' defaced and broken ; their brasses torn 
 ' from the matrices, the rivet-holes remain- 
 ' ing like marten-holes in a sand-cliff,' is the 
 accurate description in 'Tess,' of the present 
 state of the latter. On the ' beautifully 
 ' traceried window of many lights ' occur the 
 names of numerous Turbervilles, with their 
 arms : Ermine, a lion rampant, crowned 
 gules. Crest, a castle argent — ' a ramping 
 ' lion, and a castle over him,' is Tess's ver- 
 sion, her heraldic information being derived 
 from the old silver spoon that stirred the 
 family soup. A younger branch of the once 
 powerful house settled in Wool (Wellbridge) 
 in Elizabeth's time. The present house,
 
 STORY WRIGHT 79 
 
 probably rebuilt by Sir John Turberville, 
 Sheriff of Dorset in 1652, is the scene of 
 Tess's confession to Angel. The pictures of 
 the gruesome ladies that frightened Angel 
 with their hideous distortion of his wife's 
 features, can be seen on the staircase still. 
 Out of these facts, then, the debasement of 
 noble names and the strain of noble blood 
 in the Dorsetshire peasantry, superadded to 
 a desire to do battle against an old injustice, 
 and make a chivalrous defence, has sprung 
 the story of ' Tess.' 
 
 Again, from a little bit of pedigree that 
 would to most suggest a mere comment, were 
 they to examine its dates, has grown the 
 best of all the stories in the ' Noble Dames.' 
 It tells how Thomas Horner of Mells mar- 
 ried Susanna Strangways of Melbury, and 
 that Elizabeth, their daughter, born in 1723, 
 married Stephen Fox (afterwards Lord II- 
 chester) in 1736, that is, at thirteen. The 
 shocked comment of an ordinary reader is 
 turned into the story of Betty Dornell, first
 
 80 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 Countess of Wessex, in which the subtle play 
 of motive, circumstance, and character, owe 
 just nothing at all to the original fact, and 
 yet seem its inevitable outcome. The grue- 
 some tale of ' Barbara of the House of Grebe' 
 has grown out of some family chronicles, 
 vivified beyond recognition by Mr. Hardy's 
 fertile imagination. Chene Manor, Barbara's 
 home, is Canford Magna, which in the mid- 
 dle and till the end of last century was the 
 house of Sir John Webb. His only surviv- 
 ing daughter Barbara married the fifth Earl 
 of Shaftesbury, but whether the character of 
 that nobleman deserved commemoration as 
 Lord Uplandtowers, my dry-as-dust chron- 
 icles do not reveal. Barbara's death at 
 Florence, the survival of but one child out 
 of eleven, can be seen in family pedigrees, 
 but of her marriage with Willowes, and all 
 that makes the interest of the ghastly tale, 
 there is not a trace. 
 
 The scene of ' Anne, Lady Baxby,' is 
 Sherborne (Sherton) Castle. Held by George,
 
 STORYWRIGHT 81 
 
 second Earl of Bristol, and his son, Lord 
 Digby, for the king, it was besieged by Lord 
 Bedford, leader of the Parliamentary forces, 
 and Lady Digby's brother. The clash of 
 family feeling and politics, and the commu- 
 nication between the brother and sister pro- 
 vided a slight framework, but the humour of 
 the tale is Mr. Hardy's own. 
 
 The original of the Eighth Dame was 
 Penelope, daughter and heiress of Mary, 
 Countess of Rivers. The three lovers were 
 Sir John Gage of Firle, Sir William Hervey 
 of Ickworth, and Sir George Trenchard of 
 Wolveton. Her threat of displeasure should 
 they quarrel with each other on her account, 
 her playful promise to marry all of them in 
 turn, and her fulfilment of the promise, are 
 authenticated traditions, out of which has 
 sprung the strange and melancholy story. 
 
 The only interest of bringing such hard 
 dry facts as these into the country of 
 romance, is in their further illustration of the 
 way in which Mr. Hardy's imagination works.
 
 82 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 The method of many a poet and novelist is 
 first to catch a motive for poem or story, 
 which may be a native of anywhere under 
 the sun, and then to clothe it in a garment 
 of home manufacture. Mr. Hardy generally 
 works the contrary way. For some of his 
 characters, but in a much greater degree for 
 his plots, incidents, and scenes, he has dug 
 in the soil he knows best, using the material 
 ready to his hand. The foundation made of 
 this, he has let his imagination play freely 
 about the superstructure, but the material of 
 the base, and the character of the surround- 
 ings, have generally reminded him of his 
 obligations to congruity, and kept his imagi- 
 nation in fitting moods. This may seem to 
 be less the case with his personages, but his 
 study of men and women has taught him 
 how subtle a thing is human nature, and 
 how continually it is slipping the bonds of 
 local and racial harness. Wessex, and May- 
 fair, and the warm South, have each special 
 backgrounds for their dramas, each their own
 
 STORYWRIGHT 83 
 
 speech, each their traditions of translating 
 thoughts and motives into action ; but at the 
 back of the several local manifestations, the 
 general human instincts, impulses, and pecu- 
 liarities, find kindred thousands of leagues 
 apart.
 
 MEN AND WOMEN
 
 MEN AND WOMEN 
 
 Of characters in novels that are characters 
 at all, and not shadows, there are first those 
 we actually live with. Dr. Primrose, Toby 
 Shandy, DugaldDalgetty, D'Artagnan, Beatrix 
 Esmond, and Jane Eyre, are of the com- 
 pany. Probability has just as much and as 
 little to do with the fact of their existence 
 as it would have in real life. Then there 
 are those whose features, temperaments, 
 attitudes, we remember long, but as we 
 remember the great portraits in a gallery. 
 They have much to tell, only they do not 
 come out of their frames to tell it. Charac- 
 ters they are ; but hardly personages, and
 
 > 
 
 88 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 they gain admiration rather than wide 
 acquaintance. 
 
 Of Mr. Hardy's creations a number be- 
 long certainly to the first class. Dick Dewy, 
 Fancy, Henchard, Bathsheba, Bob Loveday, 
 Tony, Lizzie Newberry, Betty Dornell, and 
 Tess, are all warm with life. They live in a 
 good many people's world already : they 
 would live in a wider world were there 
 more comfortable complacency in the Wes- 
 sex novels : the lack of it is a real grievance 
 to the ordinary novel reader. 
 
 L [Mr. Hardy uses the two methods of 
 character presentation, and each with care. 
 His analyses are minute, fine-drawn, and 
 frequent, but they nearly always tally with 
 actions, and if his commentaries are interest- 
 
 _ing they are never strictly necessary. With 
 his ready invention of incident, he is rarely 
 at a loss for testing and revealing scenes) 
 Nevertheless, a good many of his personages 
 must be given over to the portrait class, 
 Edward Springrove, for instance, and, in
 
 MENANDWOMEN 89 
 
 fact, all the admirably conducted young 
 architect heroes, along with most of the 
 conventional London folks. Elfrida's step- 
 mother, an ambitious attempt, is incoherent. 
 Perhaps one's desire mingles with, and in- 
 fluences, a conviction that Knight and 
 Paula never lived. Tamsin and Lucetta are 
 shadowy ; John Durbeyfield is improbable 
 enough to make one believe him to have 
 been drawn straight from life. Farfrae, 
 though particularly shrewd observation went 
 to his making, is rather an unconventional 
 theory on two legs than a live Scot. 
 /His greatest successes have lain with 
 subtle characters, and with such as are apt 
 to be readily stirred by the winds of impulse 
 and capriceAJ even though one has to put 
 aside Giles, and the Trumpet Major, Marty 
 South, and Oak, to make the generalisation. 
 [The other characteristics, or circumstances 
 of character, that he loves to bring into 
 play, are .passion — so much stronger a 
 reality with him than with most English
 
 90 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 novelists — powers of fascination, mental 
 gifts — here he treads on dangerous ground, 
 for the greatly endowed in this direction 
 generally prove strutting coxcombs in novels 
 — and rebellion against alien surrounding^ 
 
 The comic rustics are his most popu- 
 larly known characters. There are the 
 simple ones, too unsophisticated to do any- 
 thing but show their simplicity, and be a 
 perpetual and involuntary comedy ; and 
 their neighbours, the witty ones, who have 
 mostly a spice of wickedness about them. 
 The timid man is a stock character, but he 
 is repeated with a difference. Leaf in a 
 kindly innocent way enjoys the social dis- 
 tinction of never having ' had no head.' 
 1 He 's very clever for a silly chap, good- 
 ' now, sir. You never knowed a young feller 
 ' keep his smock-frocks so clane,' is grate- 
 ful praise to his heart. Poorgrass has the 
 timidity mingled with a good deal of head 
 and vanity, and a dash of malice. ' " Heh- 
 ' heh ! well, I wish to noise nothing abroad
 
 MEN AND WOMEN 91 
 
 1 — nothing at all ! " murmured Poorgrass, 
 1 diffidently. " But we are born to things — 
 1 that's true. Yet I would rather my trifle 
 « were hid ■ though, perhaps, a high nature 
 ' is a little high, and at my birth all things 
 1 were possible to my Maker, and he may 
 ' have begrudged no gifts. . . . But under 
 ' your bushel, Joseph ! under your bushel 
 1 with you ! " ' Christian Cantle, the ' man 
 ' of mournfullest make,' is more of Leaf's 
 shape, save that he wants Leaf's joyous 
 complacency. They are various in gait and 
 utterance when you begin to run over the 
 group that includes Grandfer Cantle, the 
 ' playward ' old man; the stammering Randle 
 — ' " 'a can cuss, mem, as well as you or I, 
 ' but 'a can't speak a common speech to 
 ■ save his life " ; ' Coggan, who, with all re- 
 spect for the intellect and fervour of Dis- 
 senters, hated ' a feller who'd change his old 
 ' ancient doctrine for the sake of getting to 
 1 heaven ' ; that resourceful sergeant of the 
 Overcombe recruits — ' " What's that man
 
 92 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 1 a-saying of in the rear rank?" "Please, 
 1 sir, 'tis Anthony Cripplestraw, wanting to 
 ' know how he 's to bite off his katridge, 
 ' when he haven't a tooth left in 's head ? " 
 ' "Man! why, what's your genius for war? 
 ' Hold it up to your right-hand man's 
 ' mouth, to be sure, and let him nip it off 
 ' for ye " ; ' the maltster with his grievance 
 against all who should dispute his age or 
 put in claims for the venerableness of others 
 — ' " Ye be no old man worth naming — 
 ' no old man at all. Yer teeth baint half 
 ' gone yet ; and what's a old man's standing 
 ' if so be his teeth baint gone ? . . . 'Tis a 
 ' poor thing to be sixty, when there's people 
 ' far past four score — a boast weak as water" ;' 
 and Worm with his depressing formula, * " I 
 ' be a poor wambling man, and life's a mere 
 ' bubble." ' 
 
 But Mr. Hardy's comic rustics, as they 
 are the most generally appreciated of his 
 personages, so also have they been most 
 abused, for their simplicity, but still more
 
 
 MEN AND WOMEN 93 
 
 for their wit. The language they, and the 
 other characters, too, use, and the ideas 
 they express, have been called quite impos- 
 sible for the 'illiterate clods whom he de- 
 ' scribes.' Here the typical townsman 
 speaks. Mr. Hardy never attempts to de- 
 scribe 'clods,' and illiterateness is com- 
 patible not only with mental endowments 
 but with a wide and even an ambitious 
 vocabulary. The Dorset labourer is an 
 articulate person, and he is proverbially 
 aspiring in his language — his very malaprops 
 are a sign of it. Mr. Hardy has claimed 
 for the Wessex peasants kinship with the 
 Warwickshire breed that delighted Shake- 
 speare. Seeing the affinity between those 
 he had himself watched and listened to, and 
 the dramatist's witty clowns and humorous 
 simpletons, he dug in his own soil with the 
 more zest, and brought up native material. 
 But the consciousness of the kinship had 
 doubtless considerable influence on the 
 manner in which he presented them, and
 
 94 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 they may speak with more of an Elizabethan 
 Warwickshire accent than strict realism 
 would admit of. The objection raises an 
 important and interesting question in fiction. 
 In the delineation of character and the 
 selection of incident the novelist is free as 
 the poet and dramatist to extract the 
 essence, to sublimate, to arrange. But in 
 the record of conversation a strenuous 
 attempt has been made of late years to force 
 him to bring the phonograph into use, and 
 to demand the actual finite words and not 
 the final sense. The breach or observance 
 of this rule is a favourite test of common- 
 place critics, for the mimicry of speech and 
 accent, one of the most ordinary of accom- 
 plishments, has a knowing air about it. 
 Literalism in such matters is not quite 
 possible : for human speech is often too 
 elliptical, too stammering, to be intelligible 
 without the aid of the intonations, gestures, 
 and expressions which cannot utter them- 
 selves in print. But an approximation to it
 
 MEN AND WOMEN 95 
 
 is, of course, convenient, inasmuch as it 
 enhances the verisimilitude of the scene and 
 dialogue to literal readers ; and in depicting 
 the more superficial or the more common- 
 place events of life it is an appropriate 
 method. However, the rule of transcribing 
 literally Mr. Hardy has never attempted to 
 keep. Half his offence — if offence it be — is 
 not due to unskilful reporting, but to his 
 deliberately using a poetical rather than a 
 phonographic method. He has defended 
 himself on the point of his lack of literalness 
 in the transcription of dialect forms, by 
 declaring such literalness ' disturbs the 
 ' proper balance of a true representation by 
 1 unduly insisting upon the grotesque ele- 
 ' ment ; thus directing attention to a point 
 ' of inferior interest, and diverting it from 
 ' the speaker's meaning, which is by far the 
 1 chief concern where the aim is to depict 
 ' the men and their natures rather than 
 ' their dialect forms.' 1 These words are 
 applicable here, if we widen ' dialect forms ' 
 1 Athenceum, Nov. 30, 1878.
 
 96 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 to include all that concerns the speech and 
 powers of expression of the Dorset peasants. 
 The meaning to be conveyed is that the 
 peasants are all unlearned in town ways, yet 
 quick-witted, humorous, full of grotesque 
 and unexpected ideas, with a fine language 
 on their lips, got partly from the Bible, per- 
 haps, and partly from their fathers' bequests 
 of an older tongue. But listening to them, 
 a stranger could hardly pierce their speech 
 enough to find all this out ; so Mr. Hardy, 
 knowing them, and estimating his readers' 
 capacities and limitations, attempts a trans- 
 lation of the spirit instead of abiding by 
 the letter. He is not consistent in this 
 of course ; some of the wit and happy 
 blundering have come straight from life, 
 doubtless ; and his translation may now and 
 again end in not very fine-pointed cari- 
 cature. Yet in his main method he exer- 
 cises a right that fiction can least of all 
 dispense with now that its purposes are 
 growing more and more enlarged. Only,
 
 MEN AND WOMEN 97 
 
 after asserting this right, it strikes one as a 
 little absurd to give Coggan and Poorgrass, 
 and Penny and Spinks, the reception of 
 argument : better, surely, first to be grateful 
 for the fun they afford to a dull world, and 
 then to go and learn firsthand something of 
 country minds and manners. 
 
 Besides the comic characters, there are 
 others, strongly marked, finely shaded, re- 
 presenting the dignity, the intelligence, and 
 the sturdiness of rustic life. Of these are 
 Tranter Dewy, the kindly cynic, the genial 
 and affectionate Miller Loveday, the elder 
 Springrove, the ' poet with a rough skin,' 
 Oak, type of the patient love ' which many 
 ' waters cannot quench, nor the floods 
 ' drown,' the pure-natured Winterborne, 
 friend of all that grew in the woods, and the 
 trusty and resourceful reddleman. 
 
 Mr. Hardy's villains are mostly of one 
 type, hot-blooded and wild-blooded, their 
 senses the strongest thing in their nature. 
 But the only sensualist, pure and simple, is 
 
 G
 
 98 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 D'Urberville ; the others have some mental 
 endowment, or special personal charm to 
 aid them in their fascination, if not as a 
 saving grace. Manston is a man of parts ; 
 he has not run all to brutality. Troy's 
 romance is tawdry sentimentalism, but his 
 fascination of bodily skill, impudent talk and 
 assurance, is real enough. Wildeve has 
 grace of movement, delicacy of manner, and 
 sometimes of perception. Even Festus 
 Derriman, braggart and buffoon, has his 
 vanity stirred by a lively imagination. There 
 is an attractive air of magnificence and 
 romance about him, till he is found out. 
 Fitzpiers, too, also on the borders of villain- 
 dom, is carried away as much by intellectual 
 temptations as by sensual, and the fineness 
 of some of his fibres he shows in his fair and 
 generous-minded bargain with Grace. They 
 are mainly, in short, types of the temptations 
 of quick-natured and warm-natured men. 
 Dare stands apart from these, a cold-blooded 
 imp, ready for any meanness or trickery,
 
 MENANDWOMEN 99 
 
 and nearer him perhaps is Mop Ollamoor, 
 for he is too irresponsible to be grouped 
 with the passionate ones, this ' deil that 
 1 came fiddlin' thro' the toun,' and bound 
 the hysterical spirit of Car'line in dancing 
 captivity. 
 
 Mr. Barrie tells that in a library copy of one 
 of the ' Wessex Novels ' was found written in 
 a lady's handwriting, ' Oh, how I hate Thomas 
 Hardy ! ' Every woman will go straight to 
 the point where the novelist has offended 
 this sensitive and emphatic reader, whether 
 she shares the sentiment or not/ The offence 
 is that Bathsheba, Fancy, Elfride, and sweet 
 Anne Garland are fickle and wayward, they 
 play the fool and put themselves in the wrong 
 over and over again, and are totally want- 
 ing in that statuesque and goddess-like 
 dignity that women naturally wish to have 
 regarded as the characteristic garment of 
 their sex. But more than that, and worse : 
 these frail, uncertain creatures are fascinat- 
 ing J there is no doubt about it, each of 
 them
 
 ioo THOMAS HARDY 
 
 ' Light and humorous in her toying, 
 Oft building hopes, and soon destroying, 
 Long, but sweet in the enjoying.' 
 
 (They play havoc with readers' hearts, and 
 cause confusion in ideals. And it is so bad 
 for the world to be confirmed in its already 
 too strong opinion that attractiveness and 
 loveableness are hardly things of the pro- 
 prieties or the superficial moralities. Not 
 that caprice, by the way, is a peculiarly 
 feminine quality in Mr. Hardy's eyes\ Bob 
 Loveday and the Mayor have it as strongly 
 as any of the women. It is one of the fas- 
 cinations of human character for him. ' Per- 
 ' haps there was a proneness to inconstancy 
 ' in her nature,' he says of Elfride, ' a nature 
 ' to those who contemplate it from a stand- 
 ' point beyond the influence of that incon- 
 ' stancy the most exquisite of all in its 
 ' plasticity and ready sympathies.' In 
 Jocelyn Pearston fickleness is an actual 
 malady. 
 
 A critic recently advised him to try his
 
 MEN AND WOMEN 101 
 
 hand at the modern woman. May he find 
 strength to resist the suggestion if she be the 
 thing so named in recent novels ! Indeed, 
 what is more likely to be the real thing, 
 judging from manifestations in the world 
 rather than in fiction — an inchoate mass of 
 contrary tendencies, at an ungraceful stage 
 of growth, but only unwholesome because 
 unmade — is a ticklish thing for art. I do 
 not think modernness, save in superficial 
 accent, is lacking in the group that includes 
 Ethelberta, Ella Marchill, Lizzie Newberry, 
 and Eustacia. And persons and things 
 styled ' modern ' are always merely con- 
 spicuous symptoms of tendencies which, if 
 they be real, may in time absorb or live along- 
 side, but never altogether efface, the things 
 and types of old growth. Bathsheba is not 
 of yesterday only, or to-day. Our grand- 
 children will know her, sigh over the frailty 
 of womenkind, and love her always. 
 
 Mr. Hardy has not missed the opportunity 
 given him by his studies in human nature of
 
 102 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 (joining in that fascinating amusement, the 
 making of generalisations on womenkind. 
 The usual way of playing the game is to 
 begin by taking for granted that woman is a 
 profound and rather unholy mystery. Then 
 by a sleight of hand of incredible quickness, 
 and an assurance in the voice and eyes 
 which is more than half the trick, the con- 
 juror turns up a queen and a knave as final 
 solution, proves that he is a very clever 
 fellow, that there was no mystery after all, 
 and that the whole truth about womenkind 
 can be summed up in a couple of epigrams]) 
 Then the game begins all over again, but 
 always at the mystery. Mr. Hardy does not 
 play this way exactly, but he makes frequent 
 generalisations of which an interesting col- 
 lection could be made out of the earlier 
 books. As generalisations are always too 
 sweeping, he has honestly bought greater 
 scientific accuracy at the price of an occa- 
 sional self-contradiction. And he has not 
 dramatised or personified his generalisations.
 
 > MENANDWOMEN 103 
 
 f His women are strongly individual. His 
 attitude towards them has always been that 
 of an indulgent critic, keen-sighted for fail- 
 ings, and just: he has neither idealised nor 
 nattered them, but he has broken a lance 
 not seldom for their freedom from the con- 
 ventions that stunt and warp them. His 
 women of strong passions are portrayed with 
 special vividness.) Miss AldclyfTe is an ex- 
 asperating companion : in her ravenous 
 hunger for affection from Cytherea there is 
 neither charm nor comfort ; but she has yet 
 a power stronger than most young and grace-' 
 ful heroines to stir one's sympathies. ( Eus- 
 tacia, the 'raw material of a goddess,' her 
 1 Pagan eyes full of nocturnal mysteries/ 
 who c had mentally walked round love, told 
 ' the towers thereof, considered its palaces, 
 1 and concluded that love was but a doleful 
 1 joy?' who yet ' desired it, as one in a desert 
 1 would be thankful for brackish water,' 
 beating her heart out against her Egdon 
 prison, has that compelling force to win
 
 104 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 sympathy from different temperaments that 
 majks the woman made for tragedy ."\ Felice, 
 too, though less convincing, draws us against 
 ourselves, as she utters her terrible conscious- 
 ness of the quiet that enwraps her — ' I lay 
 1 awake all last night, and I could hear the 
 ' scrape of snails creeping up the window 
 * glass.' With that one-sided remembrance 
 we have of vivid natures we seem always to 
 see her with that ' sort of sorrow on her face 
 1 as if she chid her own soul.' (Poor Tess 
 is different from these. They are rebels by 
 nature, who would exhaust their passions at 
 an extravagant rate, and live and die with 
 hungry hearts. .Tess has the warm over- 
 flowing affection that seeks an unchanging 
 investment in domestic life. Her madness 
 is an accident as unforeseeable as her be- 
 trayal! ] Picotee, whose lines fall in happier, 
 more sneltered circumstances, and who has a 
 less dangerous inheritance, is her own sister. 
 ([Some there are in whom desires and 
 passions have been starved. Elizabeth-Jane
 
 MEN AND WOMEN 105 
 
 is one, that quiet-stepping but strong-natured 
 girl, with her ' field-mouse fear of the coulter 
 ' of destiny, a legacy from her early years of 
 ' misery.') Another is Marty, one of the 
 subtlest and most striking of Mr. Hardy's or 
 anyone else's country girls. Bred in poverty, 
 to constant work, and to more than usual 
 solitude, she has yet that keen interest in 
 other folks, and that bright mind that might 
 have meant wit and brilliancy in different 
 circumstances. Ignorant and uncouth and 
 with a spice of mischief in her, the interest 
 takes grotesque forms,, as in the case of her 
 interference on Grace's behalf in her letter 
 to Fitzpiers, and her chalked-up rhyme on 
 Giles's door. These are bye-plays in the 
 working of her pure and steadfast nature, 
 and in the history of her long, unregarded, 
 unrewarded love. 
 
 One cannot summarise all the types here, 
 but a few pictures, chosen at random from 
 the scenes where women play a part, will 
 present women's nature from no narrow point
 
 106 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 of view. Let us take Bathsheba the ' shapely 
 maid,' wiling the time away on the top of the 
 waggon of furniture by surveying herself in 
 the mirror : Eustacia seeking for emancipa- 
 tion from the gloomy heath at the hands of 
 Clym, its product and lover ; Tess happy in 
 the return of the unconscious affection of 
 Angel as he bears her in his sleep to Bindon, 
 and end with Marty at the grave of Giles — 
 ' As this solitary and silent girl stood there 
 ' in the moonlight, a straight slim figure, 
 1 clothed in a plaitless gown, the contours of 
 ' womanhood so undeveloped as to be 
 ' scarcely perceptible, the marks of poverty 
 ' and toil effaced by the misty hour, she 
 1 touched sublimity at points, and looked 
 1 almost like a being who had rejected with 
 ' indifference the attribute of sex for the 
 1 loftier quality of abstract humanism. . . . 
 
 1 " Now, my own, own love," she whispered, 
 1 " You are mine, and on'y mine ; for she has 
 ' forgot 'ee at last, although for her you 
 1 died. But I — whenever I get up I'll think
 
 MEN AND WOMEN 107 
 
 ' of 'ee, and whenever I lie down I '11 think 
 1 of 'ee. Whenever I plant the young larches 
 1 I '11 think that none can plant as you 
 1 planted ; and whenever I split a gad, and 
 ' whenever I turn the cider wring, I '11 say 
 ' none could do it like you. If ever I forget 
 1 your name let me forget home and heaven ! 
 ' . . . But no, no, my love, I never can for- 
 ' get 'ee ; for you was a good man, and did 
 ' good things ! " ' 
 
 [ .{Not in the case of maidens only has youth 
 a charm in Mr. Hardy's hands.) His boys 
 have not that heroic mien they would doubt- 
 less desire to appear with, for he has a 
 humiliating way of stripping off the outer 
 garment of dignity. Indeed, it might be 
 said, whom he loves he laughs at. But they 
 have the grace that makes them attractive 
 in their elders' eyes. His prime favourites 
 among them, and ours — they are three, Dick 
 Dewy, Bob Loveday, and the never enough 
 appreciated youngastronomer, Swithin — have 
 one charm more than the flighty heroines, in
 
 108 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 that they lack the streak of worldliness hardly 
 ever absent from his women, especially his 
 women of fascination. Swithin is poorly 
 supported, and the tower is not so good a 
 background as the greenwood tree or the 
 open downs ; but about his clear crystal 
 nature, his quick response to calls from the 
 remote heavens, and his aloofness from 
 ordinary human things, till he is forced into 
 love by the persistence of a woman older 
 than himself, there is a radiance of youth 
 and grace and the ideal. Dick, however, is 
 the prince of charmers. He may present 
 the card of Dewy and Son, Tranters and 
 Hauliers, as proof of his dignity, and lay in 
 a goodly stock of chairs and tables and 
 victuals and drink for his housekeeping ; 
 nevertheless, whenever we think of him it is 
 as he pens the desperate letter, which left it 
 doubtful ' whether he there and then left off 
 ' loving Miss Fancy Day ; whether he had 
 1 never loved her seriously, and never meant 
 ' to ; whether he had been dying up to the
 
 MEN AND WOMEN 109 
 
 1 present moment, and now intended to get 
 1 well again ; or whether he had hitherto been 
 • in good health, and intended to die for her 
 ' forthwith ' ; or, as he gives a juvenile hop 
 with one foot to put himself in step with the 
 parson, previous to telling him of his matri- 
 monial projects ■ or, as he shouts to Enoch 
 across the wood, ' " D 'ye know who I 
 ' be-e-e-e- ? . . . Dick Dew-w-w-w-wy ! . . . 
 ' Just a-ma-a-a-a-a-arried ! . . . This is my 
 1 wife, Fa-a-a-a-a-ancy ! " (holding her up to 
 ' Enoch's view as if she had been a nosegay) ! ' 
 All unwittingly, he has that charm which 
 no knowledge of the world can buy, of guile- 
 lessness, trust, and of falling in love to an 
 entirely ridiculous extent. As for the 
 harum-scarum, fickle Bob, never to be de- 
 pended on save for susceptibility, an indiffer- 
 ence to being slashed about in his country's 
 cause, and a capacity for being deceived in 
 every port, I fear most readers repeat the 
 unjust judgment of fate, and elect him over 
 the head of the steadfast trumpet-major.
 
 no THOMAS HARDY 
 
 Of the young men of more serious, weight- 
 ier cast, besides Giles and Gabriel, first, for 
 vitality and interest, come John Loveday, 
 Clym, and Angel Clare, the gentleman, the 
 idealist, and .the theorist. Clym Yeobright 
 is, of all types of character, the least reward- 
 ing to his inventor, unless he be given a big 
 world to live in. A man of intellect and 
 ideals working in a narrow sphere is apt to 
 appear as a coxcomb and not to be believed 
 in. Clym is believed in, partly because his 
 intellectual capacities are so divorced from 
 ambition, and so singularly wedded to 
 Nature, that life in the narrow world of 
 Egdon seems quite congruous, but also be- 
 cause of a certain intensity of feeling which 
 ha\ been used in his making, as if a bit of 
 his creator had been infused into him, and 
 breathed through him. Angel is of more 
 contradictory tendencies, and less precise 
 effect. While interested lookers on at Tess's 
 tragedy have rushed to vehement and oppo- 
 site conclusions about him, Mr. Hardy has
 
 MEN AND WOMEN in 
 
 left his own judgment in a half light ; has 
 pointed out his limitations, but with a kind 
 of understanding pity for him, and refused 
 to make him the scape-goat to bear the sins 
 of the prejudices of the world. Angel is a 
 skilful embodiment of a type of the modern 
 man in any age, one whose mind has per- 
 ceived more truth than his soul will ever 
 grasp, whose intelligence has outstripped 
 the' capacities of his nature. 
 
 Among the older men two gloomy figures 
 stand out, Boldwood and Henchard. Bold- 
 wood, the still, , deep man, on whom life 
 makes so few and such ineffaceable impres- 
 sions, is built in a simpler fashion than most 
 of Mr. Hardy's characters. He is no more 
 real than Heathcliff, for all that he is made 
 after a more human pattern ; but his reality 
 is not less. Henchard, that strange bar- 
 barian, love, generosity, and the nobler 
 virtues as much stronger in him as jealousy, 
 recklessness, thunderous temper, and caprice 
 are weaker in the smoother, better-drilled
 
 ii2 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 folks around him, is the type of the makers 
 of catastrophes, — broken in for a time to 
 the routine of civilisation, even in the newer 
 paths he ruled, but his natural self was bound 
 •to break the bands eventually. His figure 
 stands by itself strongly defined and lonely, 
 not only in Maumsbury Ring and on 
 Egdon, but among all Mr. Hardy's other 
 characters, and among those of English 
 fiction. 
 
 Among the older men, too, should be re- 
 membered Parson Clare, he who ' loved Paul 
 ' of Tarsus, liked St. John, hated St. James 
 1 as much as he dared.' Narrow in opinion, 
 incapable of subtlety, hard in theory, yet 
 with a heart broadened by charity for the 
 sinner, his was a nature that no mental 
 austerity could make other than sweet. He 
 is not treated very dramatically; but the 
 description of him is so vivid and beautiful 
 that one is fain to give him a place in one's 
 memory with the ' poure Persoun of a toun,' 
 and with him of Auburn.
 
 MEN AND WOMEN 113 
 
 A few classifications, references, and 
 selected portraits, do not cover the ground, 
 of Mr. Hardy's success as a character- 
 painter. And in the description of the per- 
 sonages that are not dramatic successes 
 there is always much first-hand observation. 
 On looking back at his folk, merry and sad, 
 gentle and rebel, simple and sophisticated, 
 one's first thought is that they are stimulat- 
 ing company ; the second, that, read by other 
 eyes, many of them might have seemed 
 commonplace enough. Out of ^the variety 
 which is their chief characteristic is evolved 
 the truth, that emotions and complexities, 
 varied mental and moral features, are not 
 dependent on a highly organised civilisation 
 for their existence, that if the society-mill 
 has a refining, it has also an effacing power.
 
 HUMOURIST
 
 
 VI 
 
 HUMOURIST 
 
 'here are two widely different grounds on 
 which Mr. Hardy may be considered as 
 a humourist. He has one obvious, even 
 assertive claim to the title, founded on what 
 if it be not humour is naught, and it is con- 
 venient to give this claim first attention. 
 The Weatherbury, Mellstock, Egdon, and 
 Overcombe rustics, are mainly the channels 
 through which his more evident humour 
 flows. His attitude towards country life 
 counts for a good deal in its quality ; he 
 takes his stand just enough outside to watch 
 with a keen relish the differences between 
 rustic ways and the smoother life of towns, 
 
 117
 
 n8 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 and just enough inside to miss none of the 
 fine shades, and to mix no contempt with his 
 sense of the ludicrous. This humour is mainly 
 concerned with the surface of life, though it 
 takes occasional dips below. The eccen- 
 tricities of rustic manners and rustic facial 
 expressions are noted with the relentless 
 momentary truth of a Dutch painter. All 
 the topsy-turvydom of simple minds brought 
 face to face with novel experiences or un- 
 familiar ideas, asserting their real dignity 
 somewhat unreally by misfitting words and 
 wandering metaphors, are grist to the mill of 
 this lighter humour, which is at its richest in 
 ' Under the Greenwood Tree ' and ' Far 
 from the Madding Crowd.' He has given 
 us less of it of late years, though in ' A Few 
 Crusted Characters ' there is a revival. 
 
 It reaches us by a kind of translation. To 
 live a year in Wessex would mean certain 
 failure in finding Henery, or Spinks, or Poor- 
 grass. To live ten, with ear and understand- 
 ing capable of being acclimatised, would
 
 HUMOURIST 119 
 
 probably be to find them living with a nu- 
 merous kindred. Mr. Hardy has his own 
 way of presenting the local accent of mind 
 and speech and habit, so that when it reaches 
 us it may be essentially, if not literally, true. 
 It is not the only method, but it is a vivid 
 one. Shakespeare uses the same ; to a 
 smaller extent Scott does so also, but he 
 trusts more to literalness. In mentioning 
 Shakespeare I do not allude to certain epi- 
 grammatic phrasings, turns of speech, or of 
 events, that have the look of distinct imita- 
 tion, like the scene in the vault, where the 
 familiar discussion takes place between 
 Worm and Cannister and the elder Smith, 
 on the noble dead in the coffins, or the 
 tranter's description of the varying symp- 
 toms of love, or his exposition of ' " how a 
 1 maiden is. She '11 swear she 's dying for 
 1 thee, and she is dying for thee, and 
 1 she will die for thee ; but she '11 fling a look 
 1 over V other shoulder at another young 
 ' feller, though never leaving off dying for
 
 120 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 1 thee just the same," ' or Liddy's reflection 
 on how sweet it would be to be able to dis- 
 dain a suitor's offer with "'No, sir — I 'm your 
 1 better," ' or ' " kiss my foot, sir ; my face is 
 1 for mouths of consequence,'" all made after 
 an older generation stage pattern. Apart 
 from what may possibly be an effect of me- 
 mory, there is an essential likeness. Poor- 
 grass and the Maltster, and Cantle and Leaf, 
 and Matthew Moon, are of the kindred of 
 Bottom, and Launce, and Launcelot Gobbo, 
 and of the clown who was the lover of Mopsa 
 and the dupe of Autolycus. They are clowns, 
 compounds of wit and simplicity, with no 
 clear dividing line between the qualities. 
 
 This may be but another way of saying 
 that they are caricatures, but if so, I am not 
 consciously depreciating them. Caricature 
 may, unjustly, bear the reproach of its 
 grosser manifestations, but it is as legitimate 
 a process of art as symbolism, or any other 
 adaptation of literal or spiritual facts for the 
 more striking presentation of some portion
 
 HUMOURIST 121 
 
 of them. It consists merely in the isolation 
 of certain qualities or contrasts from the 
 softening, behazing atmosphere through 
 which literal eyes behold them, and which 
 is everyday-life's means of spoiling a joke. 
 Not that everyday life always insists on mak- 
 ing use of the hazy medium. As caricature 
 and farce must be classed a good part of the 
 humour of the Weatherbury rustics and their 
 fellows. The tales of Tony Kytes and 
 Andrey Satchell, the mission of the Mell- 
 stock choir to the Vicar, Cainy Ball's visit to 
 Bath, are all farce, the last very broad farce. 
 But the fun is genuine, the absurdity is 
 essentially true to human nature, and the 
 laugh it raises very genial. To live in the 
 tranter's company is to love country ways 
 ever after. The narrative of Bob Loveday's 
 return, too, is enough to convert a cynic. It 
 is one of the best examples of that mingled 
 geniality and piquancy, where laughing at 
 and with the actors are so skilfully combined, 
 one adding to the effect of the other. But it
 
 122 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 is not brief enough for quoting in full, and it 
 will not bear division. 
 
 The geniality of country ways he shows 
 occasionally interspersed with disciplinary 
 candour. Mr. Maybold was sensitive under 
 its touch, but did not resent it — ' The 
 1 ancient body of minstrels in the passage 
 ' felt their curiosity surging higher and 
 1 higher as the minutes passed. . . . Yet their 
 ' sense of propriety would probably have re- 
 ' strained them from any attempt to discover 
 ' what was going on in the study, had not the 
 ' Vicar's pen fallen to the floor. The con- 
 1 viction that the movement of chairs, etc., 
 ' necessitated by the search, could only have 
 ' been caused by the catastrophe of a bloody 
 1 fight, overpowered all other considerations ; 
 1 and they advanced to the door, which had 
 ' only just fallen to. Thus, when Mr. May- 
 ' bold raised his eyes after the stooping, he 
 ' beheld glaring through the door Mr. Penny 
 ' in full-length portraiture, Mail's face and 
 1 shoulders above Mr. Penny's head, Spinks's 
 ' forehead and eyes over Mail's crown, and a
 
 HUMOURIST 123 
 
 ' fractional part of Bowman's countenance 
 ' under Spinks's arm — crescent shaped por- 
 ' tions of other heads and faces being visible 
 1 behind these — the whole dozen and odd 
 ' eyes bristling with eager inquiry. 
 
 ' Mr. Penny, as is the case with excitable 
 * bootmakers and men, on seeing the Vicar 
 ' look at him, and hearing no word spoken, 
 1 thought it incumbent upon himself to say 
 ' something of any kind. Nothing suggested 
 { itself till he had looked for about half a 
 1 minute at the Vicar. 
 
 '"You'll excuse my naming it, sir," he 
 ' said, regarding with much commiseration 
 ' the mere surface of the Vicar's face, " but 
 1 perhaps you don't know, sir, that your chin 
 1 have bust out a-bleeding where you cut 
 1 yourself a-shaving this morning, sir." . . . 
 
 ' " Dear me, dear me ! " said Mr. Maybold 
 c hastily, looking very red, and brushing his 
 1 chin with his hand, then taking out his 
 1 handkerchief and wiping the place. 
 
 ' " That 's it, sir ; all right again now, 'a
 
 124 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 ' b'lieve — a mere nothing," said Mr. Penny. 
 ' " A little bit of fur off your hat will stop it in 
 1 a minute, if it should bust out again." 
 
 ' " I '11 let ye have a bit of fur off mine," 
 • said Reuben, to show his good feeling.' 
 
 Oak has to bear this candour too, and he 
 does so with his usual good sense. On occa- 
 sion his own tongue was plain enough. 
 
 ' " Ay, I can mind yer face now, shepherd," 
 ' said Henery Fray, criticising Gabriel with 
 ' misty eyes as he entered upon his second 
 ' tune. " Yes — now I see ye blowing into the 
 ' flute I know ye to be the same man I see 
 ' play at Casterbridge, for yer mouth were 
 1 scrimped up and yer eyes a-staring out like 
 ' a strangled man's — just as they be now." 
 
 1 " 'Tis a pity that playing the flute should 
 1 make a man look such a scarecrow," ob- 
 ' served Mr. Mark Clark, with additional criti- 
 ' cism of Gabriel's countenance, the latter 
 ' person jerking out, with the ghastly grimace 
 ' required by the instrument, the chorus of 
 1 ' Dame Durden.' . . ."
 
 HUMOURIST 125 
 
 ' " I hope you don't mind that young man 
 1 Mark Clark's bad manners in naming your 
 ' features ? " whispered Joseph to Gabriel 
 1 privately. 
 
 ' " Not at all," said Mr. Oak. 
 
 ' " For by nature ye be a very handsome 
 1 man, shepherd," continued Joseph Poor- 
 1 grass, with winning suavity. 
 
 ' " Ay, that ye be," said the company. 
 
 1 " Thank you very much," said Oak, in 
 ' the modest tone good manners demanded, 
 1 thinking, however, that he would never let 
 1 Bathsheba see him playing the flute.' 
 
 Oak, however, in his robustness, was a 
 fitter subject for plain speaking than Chris- 
 tian Cantle, who was, nevertheless, fated to 
 endure much of it — 
 
 ' " Yes ; ' No moon, no man. 5 'Tis one of 
 ' the truest sayings ever spit out. The boy 
 ' never comes to anything that 's born at new 
 ' moon. A bad job for thee, Christian, that 
 ' you should have showed your nose then of 
 ! all days in the month."
 
 126 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 ' " I suppose the moon was terrible full 
 ' when you were born ? " said Christian, with 
 ' a look of hopeless admiration at Fairway. 
 
 1 "Well, 'a was not new," Mr. Fairway re- 
 plied, with a disinterested gaze. 
 
 ' " I 'd sooner go without drink at Lammas- 
 ' tide than be a man of no moon," continued 
 ' Christian, in the same shattered recitative. 
 ' " Tis said I be only the rames of a man, 
 ' and no good in the world at all ! " 
 
 Humour of this conscious kind, much of 
 it expressing itself purposely by an artificial 
 method, has its dangers, and Mr. Hardy has 
 not always escaped them. There is an 
 occasional difficulty in the joking. And any 
 lack of genuine fun in an intentionally hu- 
 morous scene is more evident in a novel of 
 everyday life than would be the case in the 
 more artificial setting of a stage drama. 
 Some drolleries, too, that raise a smile 
 quickly enough, suggest immediate acknow- 
 ledgment to the author at the back of the 
 speaker rather than to the speaker himself.
 
 HUMOURIST 127 
 
 It is on this lighter side of Mr. Hardy's 
 comedy that his only evident resemblance 
 — and it is but a faint one — to George Eliot 
 comes in. The shrewd or cynical things he 
 putsintorusticmouths,like "'Yes, matrimony 
 1 do begin ' Dearly Beloved,' and ends wi' 
 1 'Amazement,' as the prayer book says" ; ' or 
 ' " Doom ? Doom is nothing beside a elderly 
 ' woman " ; ' or ' " Enteren the Church is the 
 ' ruin of a man's wit, for wit 's nothen with- 
 ' out a faint shadder o 5 sin," ' have a hint of 
 the mind that created Mrs. Poyser. But 
 Mr. Hardy's rustics speak their epigrams out 
 of rather more reckless hearts. 
 
 Perhaps to find a purpose for his wit and 
 high spirits should be a disqualification for 
 writing a chapter on a humourist at all. 
 Yet, consciously or not, they are part of the 
 plan of the novels. The most susceptible 
 reader will probably drop few tears over 
 Mr. Hardy's stories. Pathos is not want- 
 ing, especially in his later books, but it 
 is kept under, and utters itself unwillingly,
 
 128 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 as often as not in mockery or irony. One 
 sin he has not committed ; he has never 
 been maudlin. And much of the sadness 
 he expresses is of a kind tears do not come 
 to relieve. Of that gentle pathos which is 
 often the to-morrow of tragedy, or its pity- 
 ing neighbour, you find little. But relief 
 there must be, else the tension would be 
 intolerable, and it comes in fun and farce, 
 where these are congruous, or in irony of 
 tone and circumstance. 
 
 Before considering his other claim to be 
 regarded as a humourist, it is well to face 
 the assertion that he is not one, for it has 
 been made. Not that any argument is of 
 use in a matter to which no recognisable 
 laws can be applied. If the humour of the 
 Wessex clowns be artificial and an acquired 
 taste, it is well for the spirits and the lungs 
 of the general that it is not too difficult of 
 acquisition ; and there we must leave it. 
 But the assertion includes not only an inap- 
 titude to be amused by the Weatherbury
 
 HUMOURIST 129 
 
 wits but a contemptuous amusement in the 
 wrong place. A favourite example of his 
 lack of humour is the talk of the dairy-maids 
 concerning Angel Clare. Their conversa- 
 tion shows a want of the quality on their 
 part, poor things. But that was a symptom 
 of their malady : how many are the happily- 
 constituted mortals who can combine the 
 being desperately in love with a sense of 
 the ludicrous? Perhaps Mr. Hardy here 
 furnished matter for a smile, not a very 
 broad one, without hoisting a signal of his 
 intention — very bad policy, of course. But 
 I venture the suggestion diffidently, for that 
 there are lapses in the humour cannot be 
 denied. Knight and Fitzpiers suffer from 
 such, and so does the whole of 'A Laodicean.' 
 The lapses are infrequent, however, and 
 always strike a sympathetic reader as un- 
 characteristic. 
 
 It is possible to have a very hearty ap- 
 preciation of the Wessex clowns and wits, 
 and of their excellent fooling, and yet think
 
 130 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 Mr. Hardy has better claims to the title of 
 humourist than as being their creator. The 
 general attitude of the novels towards life is 
 that of a humourist. Indeed one might 
 almost look on his tragedies as his transla- 
 tions of the immortals' sense of humour and 
 their manner of ghastly jesting. But, at 
 least, with few exceptions, he has his eye 
 always on the comedy of circumstances. 
 Some of the novels, like ■ Two on a Tower,' 
 lack humour in the detail, but have it in the 
 central conception. There is abundance of 
 it of an ironical kind in the contrast between 
 Swithin and his lady, her passions burning 
 hot at an earthly level, his flashing a cold 
 keen light away among the Immensities. 
 The whole of ' The Hand of Ethelberta ' is 
 a light satire on the absurd conventions that 
 have given to class distinctions a sanctity 
 no religion has ever won. ' Under the 
 Greenwood Tree ' and ' The Trumpet 
 Major ' are comedies throughout, written 
 n a laughing mood, though there are sug-
 
 HUMOURIST 131 
 
 gestions of gravity in the latter. If there 
 were no Weatherbury rustics to make mirth, 
 ' Far from the Madding Crowd ' would still 
 be a fine comedy. Bathsheba is better than 
 the sum of all their wit or absurdity. She 
 is looked at and watched and dissected by 
 a humourist, a humane humourist. The 
 incident of her quarrel with Gabriel after he 
 had reproved her for encouraging Bold wood, 
 her dismissal of him, the loss of her sheep, 
 her appeal to him to return, and her 
 reconciliation — a finely compounded mix- 
 ture of interested and tender motives — 
 could only have been drawn by a humourist 
 of rare and delicate touch. 
 
 This attitude is less evident in ' Desper 
 ate Remedies,' in ' The Woodlanders,' in 
 'The Return of the Native,' and 'Tess,' 
 if the sport of circumstances with poor 
 human nature be not admitted as a mani- 
 festation of the quality. In 'A Group of 
 Noble Dames ' the humour is wrought in 
 with the telling of the stories \ in ' Life's
 
 132 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 Little Ironies ' it is not lacking, but it is 
 gall to the taste ; there is something tonic 
 in the gall, nevertheless. 
 
 Into much of the most vigorous humour 
 there enters a certain grimness. Perhaps the 
 finest bit of comedy in the novels is the 
 scene in ' The Three Strangers ' where the 
 escaped convict waves cups with the hang- 
 I man, and sings in his deep bass the chorus 
 ) to the hangman's ghastly song, ' And on his 
 • ' soul may God ha' mercy.' The journey 
 \ of Sol Chickerel with his prospective and 
 } undesired noble brother-in-law would make 
 I a good second, but there are rivals for the 
 place. There is nothing comic about Wild- 
 eve and the reddleman's game of dice by 
 \ the light of the glowworms on the heath, yet 
 K it is comedy all the same, of a sardonic kind. 
 But Mr. Hardy's greatest manifestation 
 of humour, outside purely amusing scenes, 
 is in his conception of Henchard. Like all 
 barbarians, the man shows as a great jest 
 against the tameness, the low-spirited reason-
 
 HUMOURIST 133 
 
 ableness of ordinary life. Wherever you 
 look at him this jest is inextricably mixed 
 with the tragic about him ; and I think no 
 defence is needed for quoting, as illustrative 
 of his author's humour, the scene of the ex- 
 mayor's Sunday visit to the King of Prussia, 
 where he demands music from the assembled 
 choir-members — ' hymns, ballets, or ranti- 
 ' pole rubbish ; the Rogue's March or the 
 cherubim's warble ' — and then turns his 
 craving for harmony into a savage demand 
 that they should curse his rival : — 
 
 ' " As 'tis Sunday, neighbours, suppose we 
 ' raise the Fourth Psa'am to Samuel Wakely's 
 * tune, as improved by me?"' said the leader. 
 
 ' " Hang Samuel Wakely's tune, as im- 
 ' proved by thee ! " said Henchard. " Chuck 
 1 across one of your psalters — old Wiltshire is 
 ' the only tune worth singing — the psalm-tune 
 e that would make my blood ebb and flow 
 1 like the sea when I was a steady chap. 
 ' I '11 find some words to fit en." ' The 
 words he finds are the terrible ones, ' His
 
 134 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 seed shall orphans be,' ending with the 
 ghastly triumph — 
 
 ' And the next age his hated name 
 Shall utterly deface.' 
 
 '"I know the Psa'am — I know the Psa'am !" 
 t said the leader hastily ; " but I would as lief 
 ' not sing it. 'Twasn't made for singing. 
 ' We chose it once when the gipsies stole 
 ' the pa'son's mare, thinking to please him, 
 ' but he were quite upset. Whatever Servant 
 1 David were thinking about when he made 
 ' a Psalm that nobody can sing without dis- 
 1 gracing himself, I can't fathom ! Now 
 1 then, the Fourth Psalm to Samuel Wakely's 
 1 tune, as improved by me." 
 
 ' "'Od seize your sauce — I tell ye to sing 
 { the Hundred and Ninth, to Wiltshire, and 
 ' sing it you shall ! " roared Henchard. " Not 
 1 a single one of all the droning crew of ye 
 ' goes out of this room till that Psalm is 
 ' sung ! " He slipped off the table, seized 
 1 the poker, and, going to the door, placed his 
 k back against it. " Now then, go ahead, if
 
 HUMOURIST 135 
 
 ' you don't wish to have your cust pates 
 ' broken ! " 
 
 ' " Don't 'ee, don't 'ee take on so ! — As 'tis 
 * the Sabbath day, and 'tis Servant David's 
 ' words and not ours, perhaps we don't mind 
 ' for once, hey ? " said one of the terrified 
 ' choir, looking round upon the rest. So the 
 1 instruments were tuned and the com- 
 1 minatory verses sung. 
 
 ' " Thank ye, thank ye," said Henchard in 
 ' a softened voice, his eyes growing downcast, 
 ' and his manner that of a man much moved 
 ' by the strains. " Don't you blame David," 
 ' he went on in low tones, shaking his head 
 1 without raising his eyes. " He knew what 
 1 he was about when he wrote that. If I 
 ' could afford it, be hanged if I wouldn't 
 ' keep a church choir at my own expense to 
 1 play and sing to me at these low, dark times 
 1 of my life. But the bitter thing is, that when 
 ' I was rich I didn't need what I could have, 
 ' and now I be poor I can't have what I 
 1 need ! " '
 
 136 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 The essential quality in this passage springs 
 from the same deep underground root as 
 poetry and tragedy, and Mr. Hardy has 
 revealed enough of it from time to time to 
 give him honourable rank among the greater 
 humourists.
 
 PROSE WRITER
 
 VII 
 
 PROSE WRITER 
 
 In popular meaning, style is a convenient 
 quality, enabling one to make a guessing 
 recognition of a writer without looking at 
 his title-page, readily supplying adjectives 
 for conversation, like ' obscure,' ' subtle,' or 
 { affected,' and suggesting mental efforts on 
 the surface quite apart from the thinking- 
 task the surface may enclose. ' Stylist ' is 
 too ugly a word to be grudged to those 
 whose writing exactly fulfils these conditions : 
 the masters of style in England, save only 
 three or four whose eccentricities have been 
 the inevitable expression of their genius,
 
 140 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 have no iQannerisms, perhaps not much 
 superficial individuality; they cannot be 
 neatly summed up in a descriptive phrase 
 as guarantee they have been read, but they 
 have a language at command commensurate 
 with the force, and harmonious with the 
 tone of the ideas they seek to express. / Mr. 
 Hardy is no ' stylist,' perhaps less so than 
 most writers of to-day. The consistency 
 of the inner ideas, their variety, too, and 
 the vividness of his imagination are his 
 recognisable qualities. 
 
 But just as far as from extreme indi- 
 vidualism is his style removed from that 
 impersonal manner, the manner of Miss 
 Austen and all the story-tellers pure and 
 simple, where poetical and rhythmical phras- 
 ing are eschewed, and an occasional dry 
 epigram or a palpable antithesis the only 
 ornaments allowed. Fiction to-day, uttering 
 much that was formerly expressed by poetry, 
 the drama, and the other forms of the criti- 
 cism of life, has borrowed from them their
 
 m 
 
 fROSE WRITER 141 
 
 richness and variety of pattern. Mr. Hardy's 
 style reflects too much of his own personality 
 to be of the neutral, colourless order. But 
 it is Dot a livery; it is rather a series of 
 garments waiting on his moods, and an 
 examination of them would be describable 
 by the most contradictory phrases. He is 
 far from being an even writer. You may 
 confidently seek in his stories some of the 
 most beautiful and vigorous English prose 
 of the century, and in the track of it you 
 will run up and down almost every conceiv- 
 able altitude. A master of style he is not, 
 for, save in his shorter stories, he does not 
 master it. It does not run away with him, 
 as with overfluent writers, but it stiffens into 
 rigidity sometimes, and he cannot shake it 
 into freedom. 
 
 It reaches its height in certain tragic 
 passages of his greater novels, and in de- 
 scriptions of natural beauty in all of them j 
 but it is most consistently admirable in his 
 shorter tales. There he is unsurpassed for
 
 142 THOMAS HAR 
 
 the very qualities unhappily ' aTjsent trom 
 much of his other work, for lightness, deft- 
 ness, grace. Setting aside two or three that 
 are a trifle flat in treatment, like 'Fellow- 
 Townsmen,' ' Interlopers at the/ Knap,' and 
 1 The Winters and the Palmeys,' it would be 
 difficult to find in English or any other 
 fiction more admirable craftsmanship. 
 Their precise and delicate art Reaches its 
 consummation where tragedy or any very 
 deep human interest, if present, is, at least, 
 not uppermost, when he is in a bantering 
 mood, playing with the humours and the 
 ironies of life. There are no more deftly- 
 told stories in the language than ' The First 
 Countess of Wessex' and 'Lady Mottis- 
 font,' more vigorous than ' The Three 
 Strangers,' more fascinating than 'The 
 Distracted Preacher.' And not these only, 
 but others, too, are admirable in their pro- 
 portions, in their simplicity, and their re- 
 straint. In his lighter, brighter moods he 
 is like a sophisticated Goldsmith.
 
 PROSE WRITER 143 
 
 Yet there is a good deal in Mr. Hardy's 
 writing for which only all the interest of 
 the story and characters can compensate. 
 The rigidity that marked ' Desperate Re- 
 medies ' crops up again and again ; espe- 
 cially is it felt in ' A Laodicean,' the least 
 pliant of all, though it must be owned there 
 is a certain consistency between the par- 
 venue Paula, always standing on her un- 
 certain dignity, and such a sentence as this : 
 1 The ostensible ease with which she drew 
 ' them into a bye conversation had perhaps 
 ' the defect of proving too much : though 
 1 her tacit contention that no love was in 
 1 question was not incredible on the sup- 
 1 position that affronted pride alone caused 
 ' her embarrassment ' ; and knowing the 
 invariable correctness of Somerset's de- 
 meanour, we resign ourselves to hearing his 
 strength of mind, after Paula had been very 
 rude to him, expressed as a resolution 'to 
 ' persevere in the heretofore satisfactory 
 5 paths of art while life and faculties were
 
 144 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 ' left, though every instant must proclaim 
 1 that there would be no longer any col- 
 1 lateral attraction in that pursuit.' Other 
 writers have fits of carelessness, when they 
 are slipshod and vapid. When Mr : Hardy 
 nods, he seems to sit particularly bolt 
 upright, to pick his words and construct 
 his sentences with more than ordinary 
 elaboration. When he is bored he becomes 
 formal, not listless. This kind of thing 
 reappears almost every time conventional 
 experiences, or incidents, or characters are 
 dealt with; whenever, in short, he has 
 imperfect sympathy with his subject. But 
 imperfect sympathy does not explain it all. 
 Very charmingly is Grace Melbury pre- 
 sented; but the description is prefaced by 
 a sentence or two that put readers out of 
 tune for the good ones that follow. ' From 
 1 the highest point of view, to precisely 
 ' describe a human being, the focus of a 
 1 universe, how impossible ! But, apart from 
 1 transcendentalism, there never probably
 
 PROSE WRITER 145 
 
 1 lived a person who was in herself more 
 c completely a reductio ad absurdum of at- 
 1 tempts to appraise a woman, even ex- 
 { ternally, by items of face and figure.' 
 
 The technicalities, the tags of philosophi- 
 cal, theological, and scientific reading that 
 obtrude themselves from time to time are 
 less objectionable. They are never quite 
 irrelevant. Angel's vocabulary, indeed, 
 sounds unnecessarily high and extensive 
 heard in the neighbourhood of a dairy \ 
 but, as in Paula's case, there is a fitness in 
 it, for, after all, he was brother of the man 
 who took ' A Counterblast to Agnosticism ' 
 on a walking-tour. Perhaps it is only 
 where the pedantic language is used in 
 dealing with unlearned human nature that 
 one seriously wishes it away. Simple 
 organisms under the microscope of the 
 scientist form the abundant material on 
 which his learning and intellect are exer- 
 cised. In imaginative literature something 
 of the same kind must occasionally take 
 
 K
 
 146 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 place ; but the microscope and the method 
 and vocabulary of science need not be too 
 visible and audible. The vivid result in 
 broad plain language is all that need appear. 
 A flash or two of poetic insight does the 
 thing most fittingly. 
 
 But having said that he has unhappy 
 moments when his pen is formal and 
 pedantic, and that only in a few of his 
 books is there any evenness of delight, 
 the rest of one's space is needed to point to 
 his excellencies. It is a robust language he 
 writes, never hazy, never wanting in grip. 
 His lines are sure, and his acid bites deep. 
 Take the picture of Henchard and his wife 
 on their way to Weydon Priors fair. How 
 admirably precise are all the essentials, how 
 firm is the step of the narrative, a swinging 
 gait, with lightness in it, and swayed con- 
 stantly by the thoughts within ! Any page 
 whatsoever of ' The Trumpet Major ' would 
 serve as a model of trained and vigorous 
 story-writing, so brisk and snell is it, so
 
 PROSE WRITER 147 
 
 clear-sounding and assured. Anne watch- 
 ing the Victory sail away with Nelson and 
 Hardy and Bob on board will serve as 
 example of his tensity and definiteness of 
 expression : ' The wild, herbless, weather- 
 1 worn promontory was quite a solitude, and, 
 £ saving the one old lighthouse about fifty 
 ' yards up the slope, scarce a mark was 
 
 * visible to show that humanity had ever 
 ' been near the spot. Anne found herself a 
 ' seat on a stone, and swept with her eyes the 
 ' tremulous expanse of water around her that 
 1 seemed to utter a ceaseless unintelligible 
 ' incantation. . . The great silent ship, with 
 ' her population of blue jackets, marines, 
 ' officers, captain, and the admiral who was 
 
 * not to return alive, passed like a phantom 
 ' the meridian of the Bill. Sometimes her 
 1 aspect was that of a large white bat, some- 
 ' times that of a grey one. In the course of 
 { time the watching girl saw that the ship had 
 ' passed her nearest point; the breadth of 
 ' her sails diminished by foreshortening, till
 
 148 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 ' she assumed the form of an egg on end. 
 ' After this something seemed to twinkle ; 
 1 and Anne, who had previously withdrawn 
 1 from the old sailor, went back to him, and 
 ■ looked again through the glass. The 
 1 twinkling was the light falling upon the 
 1 cabin windows of the ship's stern. She ex- 
 1 plained it to the old man. 
 
 ' " Then we see now what the enemy have 
 ' seen but once. That was in seventy-nine, 
 ' when she sighted the French and Spanish 
 ' fleet off Stilly, and she retreated because 
 ' she feared a landing. Well, 'tis a brave 
 ' ship, and she carries brave men ! " ' . . . 
 
 ' The Victory was fast dropping away. 
 1 She was on the horizon, and soon appeared 
 ' hull down. That seemed to be like the 
 ' beginning of a greater end than her present 
 ' vanishing. Anne Garland could not stay 
 ' by the sailor any longer, and went about 
 1 a stone's-throw off, where she was hidden 
 1 by the inequality of the cliff from his view. 
 ' The vessel was now exactly end on, and
 
 PROSE WRITER 149 
 
 ' stood out in the direction of the Start, her 
 ' width having contracted to the proportion 
 1 of a feather. . . . 
 
 ' The courses of the Victory were absorbed 
 ' into the main, then her top-sails went, and 
 1 then her top-gallants. She was now no 
 ' more than a dead fly's wing on a sheet of 
 ' spider's web ; and even this fragment 
 1 diminished. Anne could hardly bear to 
 ' see the end, and yet she resolved not to 
 1 flinch. The admiral's flag sank behind 
 ' the watery line, and in a minute the very 
 1 truck of the last topmast stole away. The 
 ' Victory was gone. 
 
 'Anne's lip quivered as she murmured, 
 1 without removing her wet eyes from the 
 ' vacant and solemn horizon, " ' They that 
 ' go down to the sea in ships, that do busi- 
 
 ' " ' These see the works of the Lord, and 
 1 His wonders in the deep,'" was returned 
 1 by a man's voice from behind her.' 
 
 Examples of his style at its best are
 
 150 THO MAS HARDY 
 
 examples of other gifts, too, which it is still 
 more interesting to exemplify. This chapter, 
 therefore, may rest with its general state- 
 ments hardly at all served by particular in- 
 stances. Elsewhere, serving another purpose, 
 these will be found, and will prove that, not- 
 withstanding his occasional awkward care- 
 fulness and formality of language, his wide- 
 awake manner of dosing, Mr. Hardy has 
 the strongest claims to be counted among 
 the writers of fine prose in this century. He 
 uses no catchwords; he has no tricks; no 
 affectations j there is nothing cheap in what 
 he has written. He has the ambition of a 
 writer of romance and a poet to reveal- 
 passion and beauty and despair, the heart 
 of man and the face of the world, and his 
 best revelations have a sure preservative in 
 the force, variety, and sincerity of his ex- 
 pression.
 
 PAINTER OF NATURE
 
 VIII 
 PAINTER OF NATURE 
 
 As an interpreter of the world out of doors, 
 Mr. Hardy has no equal among English 
 prose writers. At single points in the ca- 
 pacity for revealing Nature, many touch 
 him. His greatest contemporary in English 
 fiction has as much sympathy and perhaps 
 as deep insight, but has not recorded his 
 vision with such clearness. Jefferies and 
 Kingsley were naturalists with poets' eyes, 
 but neither approaches him in producing 
 broad effects, or in the interpretation of 
 the character of landscape. His reflective 
 spirit abroad in the outer world puts one 
 sometimes in mind of Thoreau, but in
 
 .54 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 Thoreau the brightness and colour are mainly 
 in his own reflections : he reveals little in 
 the outside things he chronicles. Hardy is 
 more profitably compared with some poets, 
 and allowing for differences of phrase and 
 tone, the writer of late days whom he most 
 resembles in his method of transcribing 
 Nature is Tennyson. The intimate glance, as 
 peering as a naturalist's, and as quick to see 
 details, yet concerned mainly to extract the 
 beauty and the character of the objects or 
 the landscape, is the same. The balance 
 for perfection of expression is on the side of 
 the poet, for prose is but an awkward medium 
 after all ; but Tennyson best used this gift 
 in registering single events in Nature rather 
 than pervading moods, and the tempera- 
 ment of the outside world, combined with 
 the signs by which it is expressed, he has 
 never put into words as Mr. Hardy has 
 done. 
 
 With Tennyson, Nature is a thing to be 
 rejoiced in, to be learnt by constant glances,
 
 PAINTER OF NATURE 155 
 
 like the face of the beloved. U[ith the 
 novelist it is so, too, but still more is it a 
 thing to live in sympathy with, or at least on 
 terms of closest intimacy, a thing not only 
 with a face but a heart as well. Neverthe- 
 less, it is to the school of Tennyson, rather 
 than the less realistic one of Wordsworth, 
 that Mr. Hardy is attached. His descriptive 
 passages are an integral portion of the stories. 
 You may know your Balzac, having skipped, 
 out of the whole, what would amount to 
 volumes, but you cannot know the Wessex 
 novels with proportionate omissions. His 
 landscapes are not even appropriate back- 
 grounds merely, but living personalities that 
 take sides or play the chorus to the drama. 
 They are never vague. They arrest your 
 attention as a keen-sighted friend who should 
 point with his staff to what was happening 
 along the road, or hush your chatter and 
 make you listen. They are not merely illus- 
 trative of observation, but are essentially 
 pictorial. You feel it is by the merest chance
 
 156 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 they are not in colour rather than in printer's 
 ink. Perhaps it is this painter's way of look- 
 ing at things, this instinct of concentrating 
 enthusiasm into the interpretation of such 
 form and tone as shall express both fact and 
 sentiment, that has prevented him from 
 bursting into poetical measures to sing the 
 joy of the beauty. 
 
 The knowledge with which he endows 
 Angel, of ' the seasons in their moods, morn- 
 1 ing and evening, night and noon, in their 
 ' temperaments ; winds in their several dispo- 
 ' sitions ; trees, waters, and clouds, shades 
 1 and silences, ignesfatui ; constellations, and 
 ' the voices of inanimate things,' is his own. 
 ' The Woodlanders ' is a calendar of wood- 
 land life. He tells the clock by out-of-doors 
 methods. There is a time of day written on 
 his every landscape, and every time of day 
 he has chronicled, from ' the twilight of the 
 ' morning, in the violet or pink dawn,' till day 
 has passed and night has come again. Here 
 is one out of many morning pictures :/ ' The
 
 PAINTER OF NATURE 157 
 
 1 gray half-tones of daybreak are not the 
 { gray half-tones of the day's close, though 
 1 the degree of their shade may be the same. 
 1 In the twilight of the morning light seems 
 ' active, darkness passive ; in the twilight of 
 ' evening it is the darkness which is active 
 * and crescent, and the light which is the 
 ' drowsy reverse. J . . 
 
 1 The mixed, singular, luminous gloom in 
 ' which they walked along together to the 
 ' spot where the cows lay, often made him 
 1 think of the Resurrection hour . . . Whilst 
 1 all the landscape was in neutral 'shade his 
 ' companion's face, which was the focus of 
 ' his eyes, rising above the mist stratum, 
 1 seemed to have a sort of phosphorescence 
 1 upon it. She looked ghostly, as if she were 
 1 merely a soul at large.' There follows on 
 this passage a marvellous picture of the life 
 abroad at this non-human hour. 
 
 Night, that strange personality, has had its 
 heart read again and again in ' The Wood- 
 landers ' and 'The Return of the Native,'
 
 158 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 but never has it been laid more open than in 
 the picture of Oak at midnight on Nor- 
 combe Ewelease. A sentence or two may- 
 serve as a reminder to turn and read the 
 the whole again. ' Beneath this half- wooded, 
 1 half-naked hill, and the vague, still horizon 
 1 that its summit indistinctly commanded, 
 1 was a mysterious sheetof fathomless shade — 
 ' the sounds from which suggested that what 
 1 it concealed bore some resemblance to 
 ' features here. The thin grasses, more or 
 ' less coating the hill, were touched by the 
 1 wind in breezes of differing powers, and 
 1 almost of differing natures — one rubbing 
 ' the blades heavily, another raking them 
 i piercingly, another brushing them like a 
 1 soft broom. The instinctive act of human- 
 1 kind was to stand and listen, and learn how 
 ' the trees on the right and the trees on the 
 1 left wailed or chaunted to each other in 
 1 the regular antiphonies of a cathedral choir; 
 ' how hedges and other shapes to leeward 
 ' then caught the note, lowering it to the
 
 PAINTER OF NATURE 159 
 
 1 tenderest sob ; and how the hurrying gust 
 ' then plunged to the south, to be heard no 
 ' more. ... To persons standing on a hill 
 ' during a clear midnight such as this, the 
 1 roll of the world eastward is almost a pal- 
 1 pable movement. . . . Whatever be its 
 ' origin, the impression of riding along is 
 t vivid and abiding.' 
 
 Tho ugh he has followed Nature's gayer 
 moods with blitheness, as his strongest human 
 note is tragedy, so is his greatest Nature 
 revelation that of the earth in her sterner 
 phases. He has made ' haggard Egdon ' 
 for ever unforgetable. 
 
 ' The spot was, indeed, a near relation of 
 { night, and, when night showed itself, an 
 1 apparent tendency to gravitate together 
 ' could be perceived in its shades and the 
 ' scene. The sombre stretch of rounds and 
 1 hollows seemed to rise and meet the even- 
 1 ing gloom in pure sympathy, the heath ex- 
 1 haling darkness as rapidly as the heavens 
 1 precipitated it. . . . The place became
 
 160 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 ' full of a watchful intentness now ; for when 
 ' other things sank brooding to sleep, the 
 ' heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. 
 ' Every night its Titanic form seemed to 
 1 await something ; but it had waited thus, 
 ' unmoved, during so many centuries, through 
 1 the crises of so many things, that it could 
 ' only be imagined to await one last crisis — 
 ' the final overthrow. . . . During winter 
 
 ' darkness, tempests, and mists Egdon 
 
 ' was roused to reciprocity ; for it may be 
 ' said that the storm was its lover, and the 
 1 wind its friend. Then it became the home 
 ' of strange phantoms ; and it was found to 
 ' be the hitherto unrecognised original of 
 1 those wild regions of obscurity which are 
 ' vaguely felt to be compassing us about in 
 1 midnight dreams of flight and disaster, 
 ' and are never thought of after the dream 
 ' till revived by scenes like this. . . . 
 1 As with some persons who have long 
 1 lived their lives apart, solitude seemed to 
 1 look out of its countenance. It had a
 
 PAINTER OF NATURE 161 
 
 ' lonely face, suggesting tragical possibili- 
 ' ties.' 
 
 There is hardly a natural event that in 
 more than one aspect he has not chronicled. 
 The rain-storm in ' Under the Greenwood 
 Tree ' is as true to fact as anything he has 
 done later, but the memorable storm-picture 
 is that of Oak and Bathsheba saving the 
 ricks. From Troy's senseless revelry Oak 
 goes out into the night, and finds one, then 
 another and another message from the Great 
 Mother of strange things coming to pass : the 
 toad crossing the path, the slug seeking in- 
 door refuge, the terror of the sheep — 
 
 'Time went on, and the moon vanished 
 « not to reappear. It was the farewell of the 
 1 ambassador previous to war. The night had 
 ' a haggard look, like a sick thing ; and there 
 ' came finally an utter expiration of air from 
 1 the whole heaven in the form of a slow 
 1 breeze, which might have been likened 
 ' to a death. . . . Heaven opened then, 
 1 indeed. ... It was a perfect dance of 
 
 L
 
 162 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 ' death. The forms of skeletons appeared 
 1 in the air, shaped with blue fire for bones — 
 ' dancing, leaping, striding, racing around, 
 1 and mingling altogether in unparalleled 
 1 confusion. With these were intertwined un- 
 1 dulating snakes of green. Behind these was 
 ' a broad mass of lesser light. . . . Oak had 
 ' hardly time to gather up these impressions 
 1 into a thought, and to see how strangely 
 1 the red feather of her hat shone in this 
 ' light, when the tall tree on the hill before- 
 ' mentioned seemed on fire to a white heat, 
 ' and a new one among these terrible voices 
 ' mingled with the last crash of those preced- 
 ' ing. It was a stupefying blast, harsh and 
 ' pitiless, and it fell upon their ears in a dead, 
 ' flat blow, without that reverberation which 
 t lends the tones of a drum to more distant 
 ' thunder.' 
 
 Sensitive discrimination of the ear is a 
 rarer endowment than that of the eye. You 
 feel it is his in the opening lines of ' Under 
 4 the Greenwood Tree,' in the song at night
 
 PAINTER OF NATURE 163 
 
 among the water-meadows in ' The Mayor of 
 Casterbridge,' but its triumph is in his trans- 
 lation of the wind over Egdon — 
 
 ' Gusts in innumerable series followed each 
 1 other from the north-west, and when each 
 ' one of them raced past, the sound of its 
 ' progress resolved into three. Treble, tenor, 
 ' and bass notes were to be found therein. 
 1 The general ricochet of the whole over pits 
 ' and prominences had the gravest pitch of 
 1 the chime. Next there could be heard 
 c the baritone buzz of a holly-tree. Below 
 1 these in force, above them in pitch, a 
 1 dwindled voice strove hard at a husky tune, 
 ' which was the peculiar local sound alluded 
 ' to ' — that is, the sound of the wind in the 
 heather — like ' the ruins of human song 
 ' which remain to the throat of fourscore and 
 1 ten. It was a worn whisper, dry and papery, 
 1 and it brushed so distinctly across the ear 
 1 that, by the accustomed, the material minu- 
 ' tiae in which it originated could be realised 
 ' as by touch. . . . One inwardly saw the
 
 164 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 * infinity of those combined multitudes ; and 
 1 perceived that each of the tiny trumpets 
 
 * was seized on, entered, scoured and 
 ' emerged from by the wind as thoroughly as 
 ' if it were as vast as a crater. 
 
 ' " The spirit moved them." ' 
 
 He is a great pleinairist, occasionally 
 content to render only colour and facts, but 
 far more often painting landscape broadly, 
 with a perfect eye not only for topographical 
 features, but for the character to be read in 
 the lines, and for the mood in the tones of 
 the atmosphere. The picture of Sherton in 
 early autumn, of Ethelberta's view from the 
 giant's grave over Purbeck, the descrip- 
 tion of the kindly languorous Vale of Black- 
 more, and of the sparkling valley of the 
 Great Dairies, can hardly pass out of the 
 mind of those to whom natural beauty 
 appeals ; and how rarely can that be said of 
 pictures made in words ! 
 
 His treatment of landscape is more than 
 pictorial : it is sometimes dramatic. A very
 
 PAINTER OF NATURE 165 
 
 casual reading of the stories will leave in the 
 memory, apart from general impressions, a 
 larger number of clearly defined scenes in 
 which time and place and circumstance 
 agree to make a climax of picturesqueness, 
 than will the works of almost any other writer 
 of fiction. Anne Garland looking from the 
 mill towards the down where the scattering of 
 the sheep tells of the first arrival of the 
 soldiers ; the dark figure seen by the reddle- 
 man on the barrow against the night sky ; the 
 dairyman and maids creeping along the 
 meads to discover the noxious weed that 
 gave the butter a ' twang,' flash up on the 
 memory at once. So does the picture of 
 Stonehenge, before the policemen come on 
 the scene — their advent is unforgiveable : 
 why didn't Tess and Angel double, and get 
 caught in Old Sarum ? But the most mas- 
 terly of all such pictures is that of the turnip- 
 field at Flintcomb Ash — 
 
 1 The swede-field in which she and her 
 ' companion were set hacking was a stretch
 
 166 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 1 of a hundred odd acres, in one patch, on 
 1 the highest ground of the farm, rising 
 ' above stony lanchets or lynchets — the out- 
 * crop of siliceous veins in the chalk forma- 
 1 tion, composed of myriads of loose white 
 1 flints in bulbous, cusped, and phallic 
 ' shapes. The upper half of each turnip 
 ' had been eaten off by the live-stock, and 
 ' it was the business of the two women to 
 ' grub up the lower or earthy half of the 
 1 root with a hooked fork called a hacker, 
 1 that it might be eaten also. Every leaf of 
 ' the vegetable having already been con- 
 ' sumed, the whole field was in colour a 
 1 desolate drab ; it was a complexion with- 
 ' out features, as if a face, from chin to 
 ' brow, should be only an expanse of skin, 
 ' The sky wore, in another colour, the same 
 ' likeness ; a white vacuity of countenance 
 ' with the lineaments gone. So these two 
 ' upper and nether visages confronted each 
 ' other all day long, the white face looking 
 1 down on the brown face, and the brown
 
 PAINTER OF NATURE 167 
 
 1 face looking up at the white face, without 
 ' anything standing between them but the 
 1 two girls crawling over the surface of the 
 1 former like flies.' 
 
 The effects of light and flame are noted 
 as if he had lived for the purpose. Fires 
 fascinate him. The one at the Three 
 Tranters in ' Desperate Remedies ' is excel- 
 lently precise and impressive. There is the 
 burning of De Stancy Castle, too ; and the 
 fire in Bathsheba's rickyard. But the bon- 
 fires on Egdon give him his best oppor- 
 tunity— 
 
 ' Red suns and tufts of fire one by one 
 • began to arise, flecking the whole country 
 ' round. They were the bonfires of other 
 1 parishes and hamlets that were engaged in 
 ' the same sort of commemoration. Some 
 ' were distant, and stood in a dense atmo- 
 ' sphere, so that bundles of pale straw-like 
 ' beams radiated around them in the shape 
 ' of a fan. Some were large and near, glow- 
 ' ing scarlet red from the shade, like wounds
 
 168 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 in a black hide. Some were Msenades, 
 with winy faces and blown hair. These 
 tinctured the silent bosom of the clouds 
 above them and lit up their ephemeral 
 caves, which seemed henceforth to become 
 scalding caldrons.' . . . 
 'All was unstable; quivering as leaves, 
 evanescent as lightning. Shadowy eye- 
 sockets, deep as those of a death's head, 
 suddenly turned into pits of lustre : a lan- 
 tern-jaw was cavernous, then it was shining ; 
 wrinkles were emphasized to ravines, or 
 obliterated entirely by a changed ray. 
 Nostrils were dark wells; sinews in old 
 necks were gilt mouldings ; things with no 
 particular polish on them were glazed ; 
 bright objects, such as the tip of a furze- 
 hook one of the men carried, were as 
 glass ; eyeballs glowed like little lanterns. 
 Those whom Nature had depicted as 
 merely quaint became grotesque, the 
 grotesque became preternatural ; for all 
 was in extremity.'
 
 PAINTER OF NATURE 169 
 
 /Nature and human nature in his dramas 
 act ana react on each other with constant 
 power. The mood and will of Nature now 
 rule the mood and fate of man, and again 
 Nature is defied by the spirit of man, and 
 conquered for the time, made to glance back 
 to him his own temper, smiling or gloomy. 
 It is interesting to divide Nature interpreters 
 into their two classes, those who love her and 
 demand no sympathy, but take her weal or 
 woe for theirs, so far as they can share them, 
 and those who claim sympathy from her, 
 and invent it if it be not forthcoming. Mr. 
 Hardy is in both classes ; still with him the 
 j noocL of Nature over the mood of man pre- 
 dominates^ 
 
 His knowledge of the outside world is a 
 double one, that of a countryman and of 
 an artist. As to its artistic side, if the 
 examples have been ill chosen, readers will 
 find better ones in the books themselves. 
 His countryman's knowledge is no less cer- 
 tain. He has himself set down the differ-
 
 170 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 ence between the outsiders and the intimates 
 of rural life in a fine passage in ' The Wood- 
 landers '— 
 
 1 The casual glimpses which the ordinary 
 ' population bestowed upon that wondrous 
 ' world of sap and leaves called the Hintock 
 1 woods had been with these two, Giles and 
 ' Marty, a clear gaze. They had been pos- 
 1 sessed of its finer mysteries as of common- 
 1 place knowledge ; had been able to read 
 ' its hieroglyphs as ordinary writing ; to 
 ' them the sights and sounds of night, 
 ' winter, wind, storm, amid those dense 
 ' boughs, which had to Grace a touch of 
 ' the uncanny, and even of the supernatural, 
 ' were simple occurrences whose origin, con- 
 ' tinuance, and laws they foreknew. They 
 ' had planted together, and together they 
 ' had felled ; together they had, with the 
 1 ' run of the years, mentally collected those 
 ' remoter signs and symbols which seen in 
 1 few were of runic obscurity, but all together 
 ' made an alphabet. From the light lashing
 
 PAINTER OF NATURE 171 
 
 * of the twigs upon their faces when brush- 
 1 ing through them in the dark, they could 
 ' pronounce upon the species of the tree 
 1 whence they stretched ; from the quality 
 ' of the wind's murmur through a bough 
 ' they could in like manner name its sort 
 ' afar off. They knew by a glance at a 
 ' trunk if its heart were sound, or tainted 
 ' with incipient decay ; and by the state of 
 ' its upper twigs the stratum that had been 
 1 reached by its roots. The artifices of the 
 1 seasons were seen by them from the con- 
 1 juror's own point of view, and not from 
 ' that of the spectator.' And to that inti- 
 macy he has himself been far admitted. 
 
 But he has something besides that is 
 warmer than the artist's love, tenderer than 
 the countryman's, a rapturous glory in the 
 beauty of the world as of one infinite and 
 magnificent certainty. He makes Tess sing 
 the paean, ' O ye Sun and Moon ' in a burst 
 of pure Pagan joy. That instinctive grateful 
 joy is his own throughout, though it oftener
 
 172 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 speaks in pictures than in rhapsodies. There 
 are dark chapters in Mr. Hardy's book of 
 the meaning of life, but the dark is not all 
 he knows : the beauty is just as sure. When 
 Lavengro and Mr. Petulengro discourse, one 
 sunset, on the heath, on death, their dialogue 
 sums up much of the poetry and the philo- 
 sophy of the Wessex novels. Mr. Hardy's 
 two adverse but compatible moods might be 
 holding converse with each other — 
 
 ' "Life is sweet, brother." 
 
 1 " Do you think so ? " 
 
 1 " Think so ! There 's night and day, 
 ' brother, both sweet things ; sun, moon, 
 ' and stars, brother, all sweet things ; there is 
 1 likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very 
 ' sweet, brother ; who would wish to die ? " 
 
 ' " I would wish to die " 
 
 ' " . . . Wish to die, indeed ! A Romany 
 Chal would wish to live for ever ! " 
 ' " In sickness, Jasper?" 
 ' "There's the sun and stars, brother." 
 ' " In blindness, Jasper ? " 
 ' " There 's the wind on the heath, brother." '
 
 WESSEX
 
 

 
 IX 
 
 WESSEX 
 
 It need hardly be said that Mr. Hardy's 
 Wessex does not coincide with the old West 
 Saxon kingdom. Nor has he deliberately 
 chosen to call by the name any particularly 
 homogeneous part of the ancient division, 
 but rather the section covered by his own 
 observations. The name, in his limited 
 sense, was first used in Corn/till, in 1874, 
 where ' Far from the Madding Crowd ' was 
 then running as a serial. It includes, till 
 now, parts of Somerset, Wiltshire, Berkshire, 
 Devon, and Hampshire, and the whole of 
 Dorset. Its area would be nearly enclosed 
 by a vertical line drawn from Exeter to the
 
 176 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 Bristol Channel, thence by the coast to the 
 mouth of the Avon and Bristol, by a line 
 from Bristol to Reading, and another from 
 Reading southward to the sea : the coast 
 from Portsmouth to Exeter would be the 
 southern boundary. These boundaries may, 
 of course, be overstepped in future novels. 
 The names of the counties are not used, 
 but, instead, such divisions as South, Mid, 
 North, Outer, Lower, and Upper Wessex. 
 Outer Wessex has Taunton for its chief 
 centre. Lower Wessex lies along the coast 
 of the Bristol Channel, Upper Wessex along 
 the south-eastern coast of Hampshire. 
 
 Love and patriotism have glorified - many 
 poorly dowered places ; but it happens that 
 the region that had Mr. Hardy's first affec- 
 tions and has kept them, is one of singular 
 variety and beauty. Its history is graven 
 on its surface in wonderful characters. 
 Everywhere springing up amid the new life 
 are relics of a far back past, camps, barrows, 
 giants' graves, stone circles, reminders of a
 
 WES SEX 177 
 
 forgotten worship, of a strenuous warfare, 
 and of a patience and skill before which our 
 modern conceit falls to pieces. The con- 
 trast of this long past with a present, home- 
 like and familiar, but with no brand new 
 crudity, counts for much in the interest of 
 Wessex and its chronicles. Wessex life 
 has a marvellous continuity, which may be 
 partly accounted for by remoteness from 
 the capital, by the agricultural and pastoral 
 occupations, and partly by the essential 
 character of the people. Mr. Hardy has 
 given us the picked ones, maybe, but his is 
 not the only evidence that they are a race 
 of strong individuality and humour. These 
 characteristics grafted on their ignorance, 
 till a recent date, of the ways of the outer 
 world, have made them a rich quarry for the 
 student of humankind to dig in. A writer 
 who has made close observations of peasant 
 life in various parts of England, picks out 
 the Dorset folks for special commendation 
 for certain intellectual and social qualities ; 
 
 M
 
 178 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 speaks of their wit, their ready appreciation 
 of irony, their e native inbred refinement,' 
 their great desire for instruction, and de- 
 clares them to be 'neither sad nor sus- 
 1 picious.' Barnes is more cautious in his 
 statements, but admits that ' if they are not 
 witty, they try to show themselves so ' ; he 
 has no doubt of their enjoyment of fun, and 
 speaks of the ' lively and sprack-witted young 
 ' women.' A casual wanderer through the 
 county, with no special opportunity for 
 coming into intimate relations with the folk, 
 would at least report them to be more than 
 usually articulate. They are neither morose 
 nor abashed, and their tongues are both 
 ready and courteous. 
 
 Mr. Hardy uses to some extent the vo- 
 cabulary, but hardly at all the dialect of the 
 people. Barnes in his 'Poems of Rural 
 Life ' wrote either in the Dorsetshire speech 
 or in English. The novelist has his own 
 method of giving the spirit and preserving 
 the peculiarities of the speech in a way that
 
 WESSEX 179 
 
 will be intelligible to his readers in other 
 parts of the country. But of that I have 
 spoken elsewhere. 
 
 With regard to the identifications of the 
 scenes of Mr. Hardy's stories, I should say 
 they have mostly been made by means of 
 maps and personal recognition on the spot, 
 and, as such, are fallible. Besides, Mr. 
 Hardy is an artist, not a photographer : 
 and he does not write guide-books. His 
 accuracy in detail, where he chooses to 
 make use of the quality, is marvellous ; 
 but every place that has served him as 
 model or suggestion he has described by 
 the light of imaginative insight more than 
 of memory. 
 
 A word as to the names he uses. They, 
 too, are of the soil. Wessex place names 
 have been one source of his supply of family 
 names : witness Melbury, Winterborne, Mot- 
 tisfont, Venn, Chickerel, Millborne, and Troy. 
 With regard to place-names he has followed 
 no general rules. In ' The Trumpet Major,'
 
 180 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 save for Overcombe, he has given the real 
 ones. Occasionally, as in ' The Distracted 
 Preacher/ he has mixed real and invented 
 ones. Mostly he has changed all the names, 
 sometimes substituting an older form as in 
 Shaston (Shaftesbury), Kingsbere (Bere 
 Regis), Wellbridge (Woolbridge), Abbot's 
 Cernel (Cerne Abbas), I veil (Yeovil), St. Aid- 
 helm's Head (St. Alban's Head) \ sometimes 
 he has made a modification of the real name, 
 or received a suggestion from it, as in Sher- 
 ton Abbas (Sherborne), Exonbury (Exeter), 
 Toneborough (Taunton), Emminster (Bea- 
 minster), Port Bredy (Bridport), Casterbridge 
 (Dorchester), Long Puddle (Piddlehentride), 
 Chaseborough (Cranborough), Wintoncester 
 (Winchester), Evershead(Evershott). Others 
 are outright inventions, made, of course, with 
 an ear for local probability. 
 
 Casterbridge is a good centre from which 
 to reach the scenes of many of the stories. 
 In one of them it is drawn with perfect art 
 and truth, and Mr. Hardy's own town is ad- 
 mirably fitted for such treatment. The
 
 WESSEX 181 
 
 character stamped on it is not the mark of 
 a life that has passed into decay, but of a 
 sturdy present making use of and blending 
 with the past. The story of ' The Mayor of 
 Casterbridge ' opens, however, with the famous 
 wife-selling scene at Weydon Priors — by no 
 means the first shady transaction that has 
 taken place at the old Hampshire fair of 
 Weyhill : Langland's ' Avaricia' tells of some 
 he was concerned in when ' To Wy and to 
 Wynchestre I went to \ faire.' Susan, the 
 wife, and Elizabeth-Jane, her daughter, 
 come back many years after, and trace 
 Henchard to Casterbridge. ' " It is huddled 
 1 all together ; and it is shut in a by a 
 1 square wall of trees, like a plot of gar- 
 1 den ground by a box-edging," ' says Eliza- 
 beth-Jane, very aptly, on their approach. 
 Every feature, all the character, the avenues 
 of limes and chestnuts, the green escarp- 
 ments and walls, the streets, the inns, 
 the markets, are noted with nice precision 
 and perfect pictorial effect. Even to-day 
 this is true in spirit—' It stood, with regard
 
 182 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 ' to the wide fertile land adjoining, clean- 
 ' cut and distinct, like a chess-board on a 
 1 green table-cloth. The farmer's boy could 
 1 sit under his barley-mow and pitch a stone 
 * into the office-window of the town-clerk ; 
 1 reapers at work among the sheaves nodded 
 ' to acquaintances standing on the pave- 
 ' ment-corner ; the red-robed judge, when 
 1 he condemned a sheep-stealer, pronounced 
 1 sentence to the tune of Baa, that floated 
 ' in at the window from the remainder of 
 1 the flock browsing hard by.' Just outside 
 the town, on the Weymouth Road, is the 
 Ring, Maumsbury Ring, the great Roman 
 amphitheatre, where Henchard renewed 
 acquaintance with Susan. 'Melancholy, 
 1 impressive, lonely, yet accessible from 
 1 every part of the town, the historic circle 
 1 was the frequent spot for appointments of 
 c a furtive kind,' always excepting those ' of 
 ' happy lovers.' . . . * Some old people said 
 ' that at certain moments in the summer 
 1 time, in broad daylight, persons sitting
 
 WES SEX 183 
 
 1 with a book, or dozing in the arena, had, 
 ' on lifting their eyes, beheld the slopes 
 ' lined with a gazing legion of Hadrian's 
 { soldiery as if watching the gladiatorial 
 ' combat ; and had heard the roar of their 
 ' excited voices ; that the scene would re- 
 ' main but a moment, like a lightning flash, 
 1 and then disappear.' The ' ancient square 
 1 earthwork,' on which the Mayor planned 
 his unhappy entertainment, is Poundbury 
 Camp, where the annual sheep-fair is held. 
 The neighbourhood of Mixen Lane, the 
 1 mildewed leaf in the sturdy and flourish- 
 ' ing Casterbridge plant,' is recognisable 
 even in its happier condition of to-day, to 
 the east of the town, by the river, and near 
 the bridges. Crossing them you reach the 
 water-meadows and Ten Hatches, associated 
 with the misery of the mayor. When he 
 left the place at last, ' his path, like that of 
 * the Canadian woodsman, became part of a 
 ' circle, of which Casterbridge formed the 
 1 centre,' till worn out in spirit he lay down
 
 1 84 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 in his old servant's hut in Egdon to die, 
 having ended his strange will with the com- 
 mand that no man should remember him. 
 The jail is connected with the fine story of 
 ' The Three Strangers,' and with the terrible 
 scene in 'The Withered Arm.' Rhoda and 
 Gertrude Lodge come to their strange meet- 
 ing there from the meads lower down the 
 river, near Stoke, in the Wareham neigh- 
 bourhood. The ' ivied manor-house flanked 
 ' by battlemented towers,' the home of the 
 Lady Penelope, is the old house of Wolve- 
 ton, just beyond the town, on the north 
 side. It was into Casterbridge Union that 
 poor Fanny stumbled to die. But the town 
 has more cheerful associations. Eastward, 
 remoter in fact than the few miles of dis- 
 tance would signify, are Lewgate and Mell- 
 stock, the homes of the famous choir in 
 which the Dewys played their distinguished 
 parts. At Casterbridge statute fair, when 
 no man would hire him, Oak piped with 
 Arcadian sweetness for pence and the cheer-
 
 WES SEX 185 
 
 ing of his heart. Into the Corn Exchange 
 on market-days, among the heavy yeomen, 
 glided fair Bathsheba, ' moved between them 
 1 as a chaise among carts, was heard after 
 ' them as a romance after sermons, was felt 
 1 among them like a breeze among furnaces,' 
 yet intent on business, and ' holding up the 
 1 grains in her narrow palm for inspection 
 1 in perfect Casterbridge manner.' Her 
 home lay near Puddleton, the fine old house 
 of Waterston probably suggesting the de- 
 scription of the farm at Weatherbury. The 
 road between Weatherbury and Casterbridge 
 echoes with the footsteps and wheels of Mr. 
 Hardy's folk. Along it lies Yalbury (Yellow- 
 ham) W T ood, scene of Dick's desperate 
 nutting raid, and his reconciliation with 
 Fancy. Some miles eastward, on the other 
 side of Weatherbury, looking over the little 
 forgotten town of Bere, is Greenhill, the 
 place of ' the Nijni Novgorod of Wessex,' a 
 waning glory now, but in its full force on 
 that fine September morning when Bath-
 
 1 86 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 sheba's and Boldwood's flocks were driven 
 there, and Serjeant Troy played the part of 
 Turpin in the ' Ride to York.' It is a veri- 
 table green hill this great earthwork where 
 the fair is held; but its name outside the 
 novels is Woodbury. The carrier's van 
 bearing, on that ' Saturday afternoon of blue 
 1 and yellow autumn time,' the burden of 
 story-telling passengers to whom we owe the 
 ' Crusted Characters,' started from the noted 
 bridges, and took its entertaining way to 
 Longpuddle, which may be identified as 
 Piddlehentride. The same highway was 
 the scene of the ' nunny-watch.' into which 
 his gallantry led Tony Kytes — the young 
 man who, in return for the women's likings, 
 1 loved 'em in shoals.' While in the neigh- 
 bourhood you may trace some part of 
 Pa'son Billy's course over Climmerston (per- 
 haps Walterstone) Ridge to Yalbury Wood, 
 that reckless day when Andrey and his 
 bride, locked up in the church tower, waited 
 in vain for parson and clerk to marry them.
 
 WESSEX 187 
 
 One memorable feature in the neighbour- 
 hood of the town will hardly let itself be 
 passed by unnoticed. Merely mentioned in 
 ' The Mayor of Casterbridge,' the great ram- 
 parts of Mai-dun, or Maiden Castle, have 
 hardly formed the background for any story. 
 Indeed, they might almost overawe a story- 
 teller into leaving them unused. They are the 
 subject of one of Mr. Hardy's finest descrip- 
 tions, nevertheless, as he saw, or rather felt, 
 their surrounding presence one raging night 
 of hail and wind. In ' Earthworks at Caster- 
 bridge,' first published in an American 
 periodical some years ago, and reprinted in 
 the English Illustrated Magazine, December 
 1893, there is a little thread of grotesque story; 
 but in the main it is a description, needless 
 to say, the finest that exists, of perhaps the 
 most remarkable relic of past times left in 
 England. 
 
 The Frome Valley calls to mind not only 
 Tess. Lewgate and Mellstock and Stickle- 
 ford lie on its north side, the first two
 
 188 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 associated with the Dewys, and all with Mop 
 Ollamoor, ' whose fiddle would well nigh have 
 1 drawn an ache from a gate-post.' On the 
 road from Stinsford to Tincleton you may 
 possibly come across them. At Anglebury, 
 which is Wareham, at the junction of the 
 Frome and the Puddle, Ethelberta makes 
 her first appearance ; and here her various 
 pursuers meet, or just miss, that morning 
 when they are severally determined to pre- 
 vent her marriage with Mountclere. One of 
 the Stoke villages not far off must mark the 
 near neighbourhood of Lodge's dairy where 
 Rhoda was employed, whither she re- 
 turned many years after her son's tragedy in 
 Casterbridge jail, and where ' sometimes, 
 1 those who knew her experiences would 
 1 stand and observe her, and wonder what 
 1 sombre thoughts were beating inside that 
 * impassive, wrinkled brow, to the rhythm of 
 ' the alternating milk-streams.' 
 
 But Rhoda's story seems more a part of 
 Egdon Heath, near where her own hut stood,
 
 WES SEX 189 
 
 and where Conjuror Trendle dwelt who read 
 her influence on Gertrude's withered arm. 
 The whole drama of ' The Return of the 
 Native ' passes within a small portion of 
 Egdon Heath, and Egdon is the name given 
 to all the wild moorland between Dorchester 
 and Poole Harbour. It is broken now into 
 many parts : into Morden, and Bere, and 
 Wool, and Duddle, and other heaths ; bat 
 the attempts at cultivation have met with des- 
 perate resistance, and the breaks into green 
 strips of cornfields slip the memory on a 
 back-look at that lonely land. Broader 
 stretches of moorland, reaching immensity, 
 will be found elsewhere, but the gloom, 
 not black, but made of a secretion of all the 
 rich colours of darkness, is nowhere more 
 intense, while the lines formed by hill and 
 mound and cresting barrow have, especially 
 in the western portion, a grandeur not 
 measured by height or length or any other 
 dimension. Its lonely face, and the face of 
 all heath-lands are interpreted in ' The
 
 190 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 Return of the Native.' Mr. Hardy's sketch- 
 map of the scene of the story, given in all 
 save the popular editions of the book, makes 
 clear the respective situations of Bloomsend 
 and Alderworth, Mistover and Shadwater 
 Weir, marks too the character of the surface, 
 with its fringing meadows, its barrows, and 
 sparse trees. You may look westward rather 
 than eastward for such a tract of country, to 
 a region where thorn-trees are a special 
 feature of the heath ; but if you fail, as is pro- 
 bable, to find it, it matters little, for all 
 Egdon is haunted by the gloomy beauty of 
 Eustacia who walks still in her prisoned dis- 
 content. 
 
 Some of the best of the stories draw us to 
 the coast. First l The Trumpet Major,' of 
 course. You may look in vain now for the 
 actual dwelling-place of the miller, and Mrs. 
 Garland, and Anne. The old mill house at 
 Sutton Pointz to the north-east of Wey- 
 mouth — here called Weymouth, not Bud- 
 mouth as in the rest of the stories — has 
 been pulled down, and a red brick one has
 
 WESSEX 191 
 
 recently taken its place. But the stream 
 is there, and the downs where the soldiers 
 camped, and if your imagination be worth 
 anything you will still see theTrumpet Major's 
 epaulettes and Anne's yellow gipsy hat in 
 the garden, and hear him speaking to her at 
 a discreet distance in ' deep firm accents 
 1 across the gooseberry bushes or through the 
 1 tall rows of flowering peas.' If you climb 
 the downs above the mill you may see, if 
 your eyes and the atmosphere permit, 
 what the Overcombe folks saw when they 
 gathered there to watch for the king : 
 ' Weymouth and Deadman's Bay beyond, 
 1 and Portland, lying on the sea to the left of 
 ' these, like a great crouching animal tethered 
 ' to the mainland. On the extreme east of 
 1 the marine horizon, St. Alban's Head 
 1 closed the scene, the sea to the southward 
 1 of that point glaring like a mirror under 
 1 the sun. Inland could be seen Badbury 
 ' Rings [beyond Sturminster Marshall], 
 1 where a beacon had been recently erected, 
 1 and farther to the left Bulbarrow [over-
 
 192 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 ' looking Blackmore Vale], where another 
 ' beacon stood. Not far from this came 
 1 Nettlecombe Tout [to the left of Bulbar- 
 1 row] ; to the west, Dogberry Hill, and 
 ' Black'on near to the foreground.' Black'on, 
 or Blackdown, is conspicuous enough now 
 with its tall monument to the memory of 
 Nelson's Hardy, to whose house at Porti- 
 sham Bob walked, after dodging the press- 
 gang, to beg from him a berth on the 
 Victory. North of Weymouth is little Radi- 
 pole, where Anne was comforted in her 
 grief by the king, and from whence she 
 departed for Overcombe with ' visions of 
 1 Bob promoted to the rank of admiral, or 
 ' something equally wonderful, by the king's 
 ' special command, the chief result of the 
 1 promotion being in her arrangement of the 
 1 piece, that he should stay at home and go 
 ' to sea no more.' 
 
 The same downs call up the story of ' The 
 Melancholy Hussar,' the sensitive Matthaus 
 Tina, who, love-sick for Phyllis and home-
 
 WESSEX 193 
 
 sick for the Fatherland, planned the escape 
 for which he was shot as a deserter. Farther 
 to the east, by Lulworth Cove, Solomon 
 Selby, watching the ewes and the young 
 lambs by night, had the vision of the ' two 
 ' men in boat cloaks, cocked hats, and 
 1 swords,' looking at a chart of the channel 
 by aid of a dark lantern. One of them, with 
 ' his bullet head, his short neck, and his 
 1 round yaller cheeks and chin, his gloomy 
 1 face, and his great glowing eyes,' he de- 
 clared to his dying day was Boney. 
 
 Admirers, and they must be many, of the 
 fascinating Lizzie Newberry, desiring to keep 
 pace with her adventures, may identify her 
 village of Nethermynton as Overmoyne, 
 on the highroad from Dorchester to Ware- 
 ham. There good Mr. Stockdale, sent to 
 care for souls, found himself aiding and 
 abetting smugglers, and loving to distraction 
 the smuggler-in-chief, whose staggering de- 
 fence was that she dissented from State as 
 he from Church. His on route that exciting 
 
 N
 
 194 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 night when he pursued her unbeknown can 
 easily be traced over the hill to Holworth, 
 thence to the cliff above Ringworth (Ring- 
 stead) Bay. The next night when he went 
 along with her protestingly but protectingly, 
 their road lay over Lord's Barrow, by Chal- 
 don Down, thence to Lullstead (Lulworth) 
 Cove. That was the last escapade before 
 the desperate search of the exasperated ex- 
 cisemen fort he ' things ' sacrilegiously stored 
 away below Overmoyne church tower. 
 
 * Fellow Townsmen,' another coast story, 
 has Port Bredy, which is Bridport, for its 
 scene, ' An Imaginative Woman,' Southsea, 
 or a seaside town in its near neighbourhood. 
 Avice Caro's home was in Portland Isle. 
 Knollsea, where many of the leisure moments 
 of Ethelberta's busy scheming life were 
 spent, is Swanage. It is the place of her 
 hurried wedding, too, with Mountclere. 
 From here she set out on her famous donkey- 
 ride to the Imperial Archaeological Associa- 
 tion's meeting at Combe, otherwise Corfe 
 Castle. On her way, standing on the Giant's
 
 WESSEX 195 
 
 Grave, she had that magnificent view over 
 Purbeck and the Channel, which makes one 
 of the two or three great passages in the 
 book. Sandbourne, the watering-place of 
 sudden growth like the ' prophet's gourd,' 
 ' an exotic on the borders of a prehistoric 
 ' region where not a sod had been turned 
 1 since the days of Caesar,' is Bournemouth, 
 associated with Ethelberta's and Picotee's 
 history, but more tragically with that of Tess. 
 Havenpool, where Joliffe gave public thanks 
 in church for his marvellous escape, is Poole. 
 Here his wife, after having sent him and her 
 sons away, for her ambitious ends, waited 
 and waited their return from the sea that 
 never gave them up. 
 
 North from Poole you reach the pictur- 
 esque old town of Warborne, Wimborne 
 Minster, where Swithin had his schooling, a 
 ' " place where they draw up young gam'sters' 
 ' brains like rhubarb under a nine-penny 
 1 pan, my lady, excusing my common way." ' 
 The lonely tower, where he carried on 
 his astronomical observations and Viviette's
 
 196 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 heart was captured by his beauty, might 
 well be imaginary, but perhaps we shall not 
 be far wrong in thinking the observatory at 
 Horton, about five miles or so north of Wim- 
 borne, gave the first suggestion of it. Chene 
 Manor, from which Barbara, of the House 
 of Grebe, escaped to join young Willowes, 
 stood where now stands Canford Magna, 
 rather more than a mile to the south of 
 Wimborne. Ten miles north, on the same 
 road, was and is Lord Uplandtowers' place 
 of St. Giles. Shottsford Forum, the home of 
 Willowes, the glass-painter's son,isBlandford, 
 ' where the art lingered on when it had died 
 1 out in every other part of England.' 
 Lornton Inn, where Willowes met Barbara 
 on the night of the elopement, and where 
 Lord Uplandtowers found her waiting vainly 
 for her husband the day he was to have come 
 home from his travels a cultivated gentle- 
 man, is Horton Inn, ' between the Forest 
 and the Chase.' Continuing on the same 
 road and crossing into the next county you
 
 WESSEX 197 
 
 reach Melchester, easily recognisable as 
 Salisbury, which has a part in many of the 
 stories. There Fancy made the mistake 
 between All Saints and All Souls that cost 
 her her marriage with Troy. Viviette 
 married its bishop, though her heart was 
 with Swithin. Raye had his strange meeting 
 there with Edith Harnham, when he was ' on 
 1 the Western Circuit '; and there Mountclere 
 tested Ethelberta's feelings for Julian, organist 
 in the Cathedral, so roughly as to nearly lose 
 her. Angel and Tess passed through it on 
 their way to Stonehenge. 
 
 The Hintocks, Great and Little, of ' The 
 1 Woodlanders,' may be looked for in the 
 neighbourhood of the Minternes, on the 
 road from the county town to Sherborne. 
 Here, among the trees that made a friendly 
 home to Giles and Marty, Felice, down in 
 the deep shrouded glen, fretted her life out, 
 and for very loneliness stole the heart of 
 Grace's husband. Buckland Fitzpiers, per- 
 haps Okeford St. Pain, the home of the
 
 198 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 aristocratic ancestors of Grace's husband, 
 lies across Blackmore Vale, and to the south- 
 west of it is Middleton Abbey (Milton 
 Abbas), whither Felice drew the infatuated 
 surgeon, his wife watching him ride off into 
 the vale and over the high plateau, its 
 southern boundary, visible afar on his white 
 horse; while moving up the valley to her 
 came the loyal Giles from his cider-making, 
 looking and smelling like 'autumn's very 
 ' brother.' The Woodlanders' market-town 
 is not Casterbridge, but Sherton, six miles 
 off. Here Marty sells her beautiful hair; 
 Giles meets his old love, returned a fine lady 
 from school. From the height of the win- 
 dows of the Earl of Wessex and her honey- 
 moon dignity, she looks down on him with 
 his cider-press and specimen apple-tree ; and in 
 the Abbey aisles near by they walk together, 
 when through sorrow she has found out all 
 she has lost by her worldly marriage. As 
 has been noted in another chapter, Sher- 
 borne is also the scene of the Lady Baxby 
 story in the ' Noble Dames.'
 
 WESSEX 199 
 
 To the Hintock villages, by Long Ash Lane 
 — part of the north road from Casterbridge, 
 1 once a highway to Queen Elizabeth's court,' 
 yet so narrow that ' the brambles of the 
 ' hedge, which hung forward like anglers' 
 1 rods over a stream, scratched their hats 
 ' and curry-combed their whiskers, as they 
 1 passed,' Darton and Japheth Johns 
 journeyed on the unfortunate courting ex- 
 pedition to the Knap. King's Hintock Court, 
 'one of the most imposing of the mansions 
 1 that overlook our beautiful Blackmoor or 
 ' Blakemore Vale,' is Melbury House. Here 
 Betty Dornell lived with her mother, the 
 heiress of the Strangways, with her father 
 too, save when he quarrelled with his 
 ambitious wife and rode of! to his own place 
 of Falls, twenty miles away on the other side 
 of Ivell (Yeovil). Falls is Mells Park, in 
 Somerset. Between the two houses plays 
 the story, save for the visit to London 
 where the child-marriage took place, and 
 for the journey to Bristol, where the puff-
 
 200 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 ing angry squire met his courtly son-in- 
 law. 
 
 In following the fortunes of Tess, you pass 
 over a good part of the county. Marlott, 
 her early home, lies in Blackmore Vale, 
 1 where the fields are never brown and the 
 1 springs never dry,' between Stourminster 
 and Shaftesbury. Her search for fortune at 
 the bidding of her family, led her to Tran- 
 tridge, near Chaseborough, the home of the 
 sham D'Urbervilles, possibly Pentridge, near 
 Cranbourne, a place identified too, with the 
 interesting ' incident in the life of Mr. George 
 1 CrookhilL' After her sad home-coming, 
 when the forces of her nature revived again, 
 she set off once more ' on a thyme-scented, 
 c bird-hatching morning in May,'" south this 
 time, by Stourminster, Weatherbury (Puddle- 
 town), over part of Egdon, to the valley of 
 the Great Dairies. Sorrow has its home 
 there as elsewhere, but there is something 
 fitting in making the sparkling Frome Valley, 
 with its flocks of browsing kine, its pure
 
 WESSEX 2or 
 
 streams, its wealth of flowers, the scene of the 
 renewal of Tess's hopefulness. On the 
 eventful ride with the milk-pails to Well- 
 bridge (Wool), Angel and Tess passed the 
 1 fragment of the old manor house of Caroline 
 1 date,' that was to have such an effect on 
 her fortunes. Here she came as a bride 
 to this home of her ancestors, Old Wool- 
 bridge House, spoken of elsewhere. Out of 
 the green meadows and shining waters 
 rises gray and hoary. Its crumbling decay 
 gave the atmosphere that heightened Angel's 
 melancholy, and the wicked pictures inside, 
 with their suggestions of a bad inheritance 
 in Tess, made much of whatever case he 
 had. The mill, where he was a temporary 
 pupil, lies along the stream eastward, by 
 Bindon Abbey, amid the ruins of which is 
 the graveyard with the abbot's tomb, in 
 which he laid her in the sleep-walking scene. 
 Her way home after their separation lay 
 by Weatherbury (Puddletown), Nuzzlebury 
 (Haselbury Bryan), and thence into the Vale.
 
 202 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 Her wanderings then began anew, first to 
 Port Bredy (Bridport), afterwards to the 
 upland farm at Flintcomb Ash, in the centre 
 of the county. The bare, unkindly place, 
 where the maturer Tess felt, not for the first 
 time, the sorrow, but all the hardness of life, 
 is in the neighbourhood of Plush. No 
 wonder Marion and she would look south- 
 eastward to the Var valley, where they had 
 known kindlier days. When she was sent 
 off with the blessings and the proud touches 
 of Marion and Izz, on the visit to Angel's 
 home, her road lay first northward to the 
 boundary ridge of the Vale, then westward 
 above the Minternes (I give the probable 
 translations of the names where necessary, 
 for all are not disguised), skirting High Stoy, 
 to Cross in Hand, near the boundary of 
 Sydling and Batcombe parishes, where the 
 stone pillar with the hand carved on it 
 1 stands desolate and silent, to mark the site 
 1 of a miracle or murder, or both.' Farther 
 on she crossed Long Ash Lane, and clipped
 
 WESSEX 203 
 
 down to Evershott, then westward through a 
 gentler country by Benville Lane to Bea- 
 minster, where Parson Clare ministered. 
 Frightened by the overheard words of Mercy 
 Chant and the brothers Clare, she took the 
 fifteen mile road back again, without fulfil- 
 ling her errand. It was at Evershott she 
 recognised Alec D'Urberville in the ranting 
 preacher, and at the old pagan monument 
 of Cross in Hand, he made her swear, with 
 a strange irony, never to tempt him from 
 his mission by her charms. Family troubles 
 brought her to Marlott again, and turned 
 the Durbeyfields adrift on the world. They 
 sought a new home at Kingsbere (Bere 
 Regis), an earlier possession of their ancestors 
 than Woolbridge. It was on Old Lady Day 
 they made the move, meeting 'many other 
 1 waggons with families on the summit of 
 ' the load, which was built on a well-nigh 
 ' unvarying principle, as peculiar, probably, 
 ' to the rural labourer, as the hexagon to the 
 ' bee. The ground-work of the arrangement
 
 204 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 1 was the family dresser, which, with its 
 1 shining handles, and finger marks, and 
 1 domestic evidences thick upon it, stood 
 1 importantly in front, over the tails of the 
 ' shaft-horses, in its erect and natural position, 
 1 like some Ark of the Covenant that they 
 ' were bound to carry reverently.' Mr. Hardy 
 has described the same scene elsewhere, 
 in his article on 'The Dorset Labourer'; 
 and the sight is indeed a striking one, 
 strangely compounded of melancholy and 
 hope. Under the churchyard wall of 'the 
 ' half-dead townlet ' of Bere, the waggon was 
 unloaded, since D'Urberville, to gain his 
 private ends, had frustrated their plan of 
 taking lodgings. By the south wall of the 
 fine old church, the family tester was set up, 
 under the traceried window of many lights, 
 blazoned with the names and arms of the 
 Turbervilles. The ubiquitous villain turned 
 up ■ the family were saved from penury, and 
 Tess's tragedy moved fast. She passed then 
 to Sandbourne, that is, Bournemouth. Her
 
 W E S S E X 205 
 
 escape with Angel lay north through the 
 New Forest to Salisbury and Stonehenge. 
 The last scene of all was at Winchester, out 
 of which Angel and Liza-Lu walked hand-in- 
 hand. 
 
 Winchester plays a part in a minor drama. 
 In the most convenient of towns ' for medi- 
 c tative people to live in ; since there you 
 ' have a Cathedral with a nave so long that 
 { it affords space in which to walk and summon 
 1 your remoter moods without continually 
 ' turning on your heel, or seeming to do more 
 1 than take an afternoon stroll under cover 
 1 from the rain and the sun,' there, in the 
 Cathedral itself, did Sir Ashley Mottisfont ask 
 in marriage Philippa, ' the gentle daughter 
 ' of plain Squire Okehall ' ; and thus made a 
 home, for the time, for the poor shuttle- 
 cocked Dorothy. 
 
 Near Aldbrickham (Reading) lies the 
 village whence Sophy was taken out of her 
 sphere to which she would fain have returned, 
 had not her rigid son put his veto on her
 
 206 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 marriage with the honest greengrocer. To 
 other outlying parts, Toneborough and Exon- 
 bury (Taunton and Exeter), Mr. Millborne 
 returned to expiate his youthful wrong-doing, 
 an expiation which had consequences of a 
 kind to shake the foundations of any ordinary 
 conscience. The Lady Icenway hailed from 
 this side too, from 'one o' the greenest bit 
 ' of woodlands between Bristol and the city 
 ' of Exonbury,' and the Honourable Laura's 
 adventures took place on the wild north 
 coast of Lower Wessex. 
 
 Thus, through the Wessex novels we 
 trudge many roads, and through varied 
 landscapes. And if the mere identification 
 of localities be but of minor interest, in the 
 course of it there is abundant illustration of 
 the part that scene and landscape play in 
 Mr. Hardy's dramas, a part of much con- 
 sequence to the characters, and often hardly 
 subordinate to them.
 
 POINT OF VIEW
 
 X 
 POINT OF VIEW 
 
 It is an unsatisfactory kind of homage to 
 attempt to construct a complex system of 
 thought from a novelist's pictures of life. 
 He can retort on your blunders by saying 
 he only holds up a mirror and catches reflec- 
 tions. But, at least, the mind and the eye 
 and the angle of vision concern the reflec- 
 tions. And Mr. Hardy has a special point 
 of view, by which I do not mean a theory of 
 art, but a theory of life at least consistent 
 enough to give an interest to his work apart 
 from its artistic value. To treat the Wessex 
 novels merely as scenic and dramatic repre- 
 sentations is to ignore one of their vital 
 characteristics. This point of view is not 
 o
 
 2io THOMAS HARDY 
 
 completely expounded. It is a matter of 
 temperament perhaps as much as of opinion ; 
 but it asserts itself with a pervasive force 
 from which no reader can escape. 
 
 \To call him pessimist is short and easy ; 
 only it hides half the truth. He is so, of 
 course, but with a difference. Yet in insist- 
 ing on the difference one cannot slur over 
 the pessimism ; he is particularly emphatic 
 about it himself. From his survey of the 
 world he has concluded that life is gay only 
 so long as its conditions are unknown, that 
 real happiness is incompatible with fearless 
 thought and the knowledge that science has 
 made common property of the shortcomings 
 of natural laws, which cripple human powers, 
 and the defects of which no human devotion 
 can remedy. \It is noticeable that to almost 
 all his tragic characters he has given the 
 power and habit of thinking.! There are 
 darker views of the present compatible with 
 a different conclusion, if the ills of life are 
 held to be not the necessary symptoms of
 
 POINT OF VIEW 211 
 
 faulty laws of nature, but of a rotten social 
 system, curable by time and revolution and 
 the inculcation of a keener sense of moral re- 
 sponsibility. (Mr. Hardy would probably use 
 ' alleviation ' instead of ; cure,' though his 
 pessimism has never taken away his belief in 
 the usefulness of human struggle. You will 
 find many utterances scattered up and down 
 his writings sympathetic with the reforming 
 spirit ; and ' Tess ' is, of course, a defiant chal- 
 lenge to the world to revise a cruel social 
 code — a defiance which despair alone could 
 not emit. J 
 
 Never did a novelist feel less compelled 
 to invent happy endings. He would say 
 he invents no endings, but gives the natural 
 ones, according to his experience of life. 
 Clym's life is wrecked by an unselfish and 
 inevitable devotion to what was alien to him : 
 Troy has the love of women, not John, or 
 Giles ; Gabriel only comes to his own after 
 the zest of life has departed from him and 
 Bathsheba ; the Mayor dies alone in poverty
 
 212 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 after efforts that Farfrae would never need to 
 make ; Marty is left with a grave to keep ; 
 the repentance of Millborne brings his ruin ; 
 Tess, born for sheltered domesticity, dies a 
 felon's death. Examples come thickly on 
 the memory, j Mr. Hardy's emphatic lack of 
 cheerful complacency in his final view of life 
 has effectually barred his way to a very wide 
 popularity -4- 
 
 haec ratio plerumque videtur tristior esse 
 quibus non est tract at a, retroque volgus 
 abhorret ab hac. 
 
 The sum of his reflections, and the conclu- 
 sion to be drawn from his examples, are not 
 gay. But they are not dispiriting, and never 
 brought on a coward mood. The only really 
 dispiriting thing in the world is cynicism, 
 and though satire and bitter irony are fre- 
 quent with Mr. Hardy, of cynicism he utters 
 not a word. (The tragic, his deepest note, is 
 furthest of all from the cynical, for it recog- 
 nises in the fragile, battered thing called life 
 the stirrings and impulses of greatness. Life
 
 POINT OF VIEW 213 
 
 is not little, nor cheap, nor easily found out. 
 And its path is lined with interest. ) Since it 
 has to be walked, why shut your eyes to the 
 excellent entertainment by the way ? The 
 permutations and combinations of human 
 motive and instinct and conduct are in- 
 finite. Its problems and dramas are in- 
 numerable , your simplest neighbour has an 
 ocean of the unexpected in him, and pro- 
 vides continual comedy. / If the novelist has 
 any clear moral duty to perform, it is to show 
 that life is strong enough in interest to make 
 it worth while living. This Mr. Hardy has 
 done abundantly. And not only has he 
 shown it as full of interest, but also of 
 beautyj The road to dusty death is warmed 
 by the sun ; the sap rises in the wayside trees 
 every year; the spring wind on the down, 
 the fresh life in the grass, are, while experi- 
 ence of them lasts, just as real as sorrow, and 
 it would be the foolishest asceticism that 
 would shut the doors of the heart on them. 
 There is another reality, too, the need in a
 
 214 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 vexing world of sympathy ; and thus all 
 reasons for cynicism are taken away. f< Mr. 
 Hardy has faced the sadness of life, and 
 spoken it. We may wish he had felt less 
 cause to express it so frequently. He cannot 
 offer, as does his countryman Barnes, the 
 consolation in the dream of ' a year that 's 
 1 winterless, where glassy waters never vroze.' 
 fBut, even for those who accept his conclu- 
 sions as truth, by urging and proving the 
 interest and beauty of the world he has taken 
 the worst part of the curse away. 
 
 ^\.nd his pessimism does not mean a placid 
 acceptance of the ills of life.) The patience, 
 or it may be, the low vitality, that marks 
 some sad-voiced exponents of the view, is 
 not his. You never feel enervated as after 
 a course of Russian fiction, i He is often in 
 revolt : otherwise he would be no tragedian. | 
 Perhaps placidity and indifference would be 
 more logical in the looker-on at so imperfect 
 a world ; but men of vigour are not made 
 that way. Huma n nature and Nature's laws
 
 POINT OF VIEW 215 
 
 are so little in accord that the complete sub- 
 jection of the heart and tongue of man is 
 impossible except from sheer fatigue. He 
 will not mock at the creatures who sin and 
 suffer in consequence of decrees misunder- 
 stood or contradictory. In his revolt and in 
 his resignation he cries to whatever powers 
 may be, 
 
 ' For all the sin wherewith the Face of Man 
 Is blackened — Man's forgiveness give — and take ! ' 
 
 Save where men continue to thwart and 
 narrow the remaining chances of life, he takes 
 side with humanity against the Olympians. 
 
 Mr. Hardy is not a moralist. But infer- 
 entially he inculcates some things that are 
 of importance to morality, and nearly all of 
 these, when applied, are weapons hurled at 
 the conventions. The hatefulness of cant 
 everywhere, but especially in morals, where 
 no rule-of-thumb is of service, but heart and 
 mind must continually be exercised ; the 
 cowardice of mere propriety, and all obedi- 
 ence to something learnt in other circum-
 
 216 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 stances instead of something felt in these ; 
 the cruelty of class prejudice, he has abun- 
 dantly satirised. ! And, on this moral side, 
 it is of particular interest to note in a novelist 
 MTose frequent theme is the caprice, the 
 weakness, the wandering nature of human- 
 kind, his unshaken faith in the power that 
 the ideal has over human hearts, over the 
 elect, who will always be few, but who will not 
 fail, from one generation to another. | ^He is 
 never sceptical about the power of spiritual 
 rewardj seeming to regard the ' absolute 
 1 gratuitousness ' of any ideal act, like Mr. 
 Millborne's reparation, in ' For Conscience 
 ' Sake,' ' as being a special inducement to per- 
 ' form it.' flndeed there is a rare mixture of 
 hope and belief in Mr. Hardy's dark views. 
 His humanism is not merely an intellectual 
 or dramatic interest in the doings and motives 
 of men ; with it are mingled trust and sym- 
 pathy. / Man's nature is, as he says, in what 
 reads like a fine version of Pascal, ' neither 
 ' ghastly, hateful, nor ugly ; neither common-
 
 POINT OF VIEW 217 
 
 ' place, unmeaning, nor tame, but . . .slighted 
 1 and enduring ; and withal singularly colossal 
 ' and mysterious.' The troubles of men he 
 will not always treat as sordid maladies, but 
 as honourable scars, ' miseres de grand sei- 
 ' gneur.'' jle. has laughed at human nature, 
 but he has never belittled it. / 
 
 So much for the temper underlying his 
 more serious work. But in the material 
 which he uses to show the tragedy and the 
 comedy of life his point of view is just as 
 much involved. /Mr. Hardy recognises, with- 
 out apology, the passion in human nature in 
 a franker way) than any of the other greater 
 English novelists save the two elder Brontes. 
 Till recently, English fiction was singularly 
 lacking in its delineation, or in the present- 
 ment of the moral questions of which it is 
 the source. Where strong passions form the 
 motives of stories in the great period, as they 
 do, scenically, in Scott, and with more per- 
 sonal intensity in Thackeray, they are mostly 
 imagined on conventional lines, and as paying
 
 218 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 due deference to social laws. This is perhaps 
 the normal condition Of things. Very likely 
 we shall come back to it when the old order 
 is reaccepted, or a new one established. 
 But the fiction of a day when every law is 
 weighed in the balance, and many are found 
 wanting, is bound to be morally experi- 
 mental and turbulent. Scott and Thackeray 
 lived in stirring enough times, but the fer- 
 ments then were political rather than moral. 
 The forces of the Revolution first touched, 
 for a few, poetry, for the many, politics. 
 Only a small number of peculiarly impres- 
 sionable souls, like Shelley, were stirred to 
 investigate and question the adequacy of the 
 accepted moral code. Practical England had 
 settled that long ago in a way no scatter- 
 brained poet could disturb. The wave of 
 change swept into the political world, swamp- 
 ing, disintegrating, with a long, steady force, 
 and then into the religious one no less 
 strongly. It has reached the world of morals 
 at last.
 
 POINT OF VIEW 219 
 
 The recognition of the right, or, at least, 
 of the might, of passion, and of the import- 
 ance of sexual questions in modern English 
 novels, are two parallel but widely different 
 facts. Unhappily, only the latter is real to 
 any very great extent. I The problems of the 
 sexes are of keen present interest, affecting • 
 as they do everybody to some extent; The 
 solutions attempted, and the examples pre- 
 sented, are often false and frivolous, but the 
 interest they represent is real enough, a fa- 
 tiguing reality, perhaps, but one that has to be 
 faced till the intelligent acceptance of some 
 code, old or new, be a general fact. Stories 
 of great passions are common, too, as black- 
 berries, but it is not only their presentment 
 that is artificial. They are mostly hollow 
 altogether. For passion, the genius of the 
 human heart, is by no means a common 
 thing. Perhaps not only in appearance, 
 but in fact, is the English race passionless, 
 with capacities for breeding great excep- 
 tions. Even in our earlier fiction, which was
 
 220 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 assuredly far from reticent, it is by no means 
 a conspicuous note. The dramatists chose 
 their examples mostly from warmer skies, and 
 it was only rare natures they endowed with 
 the capacity, not the average men and 
 women born in the brain of average novelists. 
 It exists, nevertheless, among a cold and 
 a practical people, and though the taboo has 
 not been taken off its expression, it is recog- 
 nised, with feverish feebleness, by many, and 
 with the direct force that belongs to it by a 
 few. In the social ferment it has been re- 
 discovered as a tremendous human power 
 existing in life, rarely but very really, outside 
 poetry, this very day as well as in the early 
 world, material for fiction as well as for 
 opera. 
 
 In considering France, the other principal 
 fiction-producing country, it would be absurd 
 to name the social ferment as bringing pas- 
 sion, with the moral questions involved, 
 into prominence. It has never sought justi- 
 fication there. And the second influence on
 
 POINT OF VIEW 221 
 
 our freer-spoken novel of to-day is, of course, 
 a French one. This is not the place to 
 acknowledge our literary debt to France. It 
 is enough to say that French novelists em- 
 phasised the fact that English ones were 
 missing great human chances by keeping 
 whole chapters of the book of life unwritten 
 — chapters just as moral or non-moral as the 
 others already disclosed. The gratitude of 
 English readers for the greater frankness 
 and wider compass of French fiction has too 
 often ended in indiscriminating admiration. 
 A native manufacture of the thing has been 
 set up from an English translation of the 
 French receipt. The supply is hardly a matter 
 for congratulation. For the passion and the 
 revolt from conventional morals in modern 
 French literature are not mere frank recog- 
 nitions of a reality. The thing is absurdly 
 overdone. It has swamped the rest of life's 
 interests. It has become partly a trick and 
 partly a mania, and it ends by boring us in- 
 extinguishably till we are ready to put up
 
 222 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 equal claims for any of the other human 
 activities as material for the novelist, for 
 money-getting, tiger-hunting, gold-digging, 
 prize-fighting, or horse-racing. Needless to 
 say, the great writers of fiction have hardly 
 ever left us in this mood, for they have that 
 essential sincerity which in an artistic sense 
 is the concomitant of supreme talent. But 
 the detestablest thing on earth is simulated 
 passion; the most unwholesome, the stupidest, 
 its manufacture for trade purposes. And one 
 of the chief inconveniences of this cheap 
 erotic fiction, and of the handling of delicate 
 moral problems by bunglers, is that for a 
 time, long enough to cause annoyance, the 
 false is confused with the real and brings on 
 it reproach. For the weak dabblers in this 
 dangerous research the real students, with 
 their fingers on human hearts and pulses, 
 are made responsible. Mr. Hardy has 
 suffered in this way. 
 
 From the beginning he sounded the note/ 
 of human passion. The persons in the fore-
 
 POINT OF VIEW 223 
 
 ground of his dramas are chosen from be- 
 yond the commonplace, and they mostly play 
 their parts in ' those sequestered spots out- 
 1 side the gates of the world, where may 
 ' usually be found more meditation than 
 1 action, and more listlessness than medita- 
 ' tion ; where reasoning proceeds on narrow 
 ' premises, and results in inferences wildly 
 1 imaginative ; yet where, from time to time, 
 ' dramas of a grandeur and unity truly Sopho- 
 ' clean, are enacted in the real, by virtue of 
 1 the concentrated passions and closely-knit 
 ' interdependence of the lives therein.' In 
 ' Tess,' it takes a more prominent place 
 only because there it is argued about. Pro- 
 bably Mr. Hardy's point of view has altered 
 little. That his passions are realities has 
 never been challenged, and it has never been 
 stated in so many words that he should not 
 deal with love at white heat, only that he 
 might slur or veil its expression a little more. 
 It is an old contest, which it is best to leave 
 as a choice or a question. Mr. Hardy pre-
 
 224 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 fers frankness. But good taste is compatible 
 with a large degree of frankness, and consi- 
 dering his unconventional views, and the 
 boldness of his ventures, his reticence is 
 much more remarkable than his freedom. 
 And his claim, implied and expressed, for 
 liberty of speech he has not abused. The 
 chronicling of sordid detail, the childish 
 pride in being audacious and outrageous, 
 are not temptations for him. ^Perh aps there 
 is no novelist with whom a love of beauty 
 has been a more persistent force : it has 
 kept him in wholesome ways. Acciden- 
 tal horrors and uglinesses have hardly any 
 place in his work at all. Only, where a thing 
 touches human life closely enough to make 
 it worth representation in a story, it has been 
 thought worthy of truthful expression. If it 
 be a warm thing, a warm word is used, and 
 he is not much concerned whether it be in 
 drawing-room vocabularies or not. In the 
 criticisms of Mr. Hardy's work the word 
 1 coarse ' occurs from time to time applied
 
 POINT OF VIEW 225 
 
 to his language. The instances are not many 
 where one could identify the words com- 
 plained of unless by assuming a rigidly con- 
 ventional mood. The main point is that, if 
 identified, they are found not to be used idly. 
 They are finger-posts to a reality which 
 otherwise the timid reader would slur, and 
 for slurring or shrinking this novelist very 
 much in earnest has no desire. Mr. Hardy 
 has never skulked. 
 
 The second request made of story-writers 
 who deal in the inconvenient thing called 
 passion, is that they should show up its in- 
 convenience, and indeed give it adequate 
 punishment. Now, although Mr. Hardy 
 would not often be in a mood to oblige this 
 kind of critic, he is bound to be in agreement 
 with him here. For passion is so unsatisfied 
 and eternally tragic a thing, hurting itself 
 against circumstances too narrow to contain 
 it, thrust back and foiled continually, that 
 pain is its twin-brother, even though it burst 
 into no wild deed calling for the exercise of
 
 226 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 the law. The immortals have arranged all 
 that. In some modern English novels held 
 to be particularly elevating, the hero or 
 heroine after giving way to the inundations 
 of passion reappears when the wave has 
 passed, never a penny the better or worse or 
 different. Such ignorance of the ravages as 
 of the exaltation of passion is an immorality 
 of which Mr. Hardy is quite incapable. It 
 is no plaything with him. Boldwood, Tess, 
 Clym, Eustacia, and its other victims, pay 
 the full penalty always, because human laws 
 \ demand it, and he cannot save them. But 
 v he has great pity for those for whom the 
 Vworld has little mercy. 
 
 The justification or glorification of passion 
 is, however, not the most serious criticism 
 that has been brought against him. He is 
 charged with a preference for such subjects 
 as stimulate the senses. This is worth while 
 bringing to proof, and one looks over the 
 novels to see what character to give over to 
 the severities of the censor, and what situa-
 
 POINT OF VIEW 227 
 
 tions one would like to reconstruct on a more 
 moral basis. Surely Miss Aldclyffe, poor 
 storm-tossed soul, may be left in peace. Lord 
 Mountclere is a disagreeable old gentleman 
 of a conventional type, but his path was not 
 an easy one after he married Ethelberta. De 
 Stancy is certainly unwholesome. One is 
 inclined to make him the scapegoat, place 
 the highly respectable book in which he 
 figures on the Index, and enjoy this outrage 
 on the proprieties of Paula and Somerset. 
 Viviette is not healthy in soul : in that her 
 unnatural circumstances have their natural 
 consequence. The Noble Dames are of a 
 day of freer manners than ours, but their 
 freedoms are scrupulously translated into 
 words that will offend as little as possible the 
 straiter morals of the present. Charles Raye 
 of ' On the Western Circuit,' stands out 
 readier than most for absolute condemnation; 
 but he is expressly treated as no hero : only 
 a little pity is shown him in the strange situa- 
 tion into which, by an unforeseen path, his
 
 228 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 fault has led him. Alec D'Urberville, the 
 type of sensuality in its most undiluted form, 
 is surely an awful warning ; and is poor Tess, 
 because her heart was surcharged with a 
 good thing, and her person had attractions 
 which, being of moment in her history, are 
 chronicled, to be held accurst ? She can 
 suggest evil thoughts only to the vile. Yet, 
 to be candid, in the search for instances to 
 support the criticism, one must own to find- 
 ing a good deal that is, at least, morbid. 
 
 Mr. Hardy is certainly not coerced by the 
 influences of his time, but certain features 
 of it he reflects ; the psychology of love 
 is a study of the day, and the neurotic and 
 the abnormal have inevitable attractions for 
 the student of the workings of the human 
 mind. From this scientific interest spring 
 'Squire Petrick's Lady,' 'On the Western 
 Circuit,' and 'An Imaginative Woman.' 
 The only way to escape from the influence 
 is to write of wild adventure, to use love 
 superficially as a mere starting-point or goal,
 
 POINT OF VIEW 229 
 
 of no real interest in the actual runninsr of 
 the romance. Excellent things are these 
 tales of adventure, but not what he was 
 called to write. And the head and front of 
 his offending is that, more from his hatred 
 of the commonplace than his preference for 
 the morbid, he has put some of his men and 
 women in strange situations, where whole- 
 some thoughts could hardly grow, and that, 
 when the animal nature or superficial attrac- 
 tions, apart from the heart and brain, have 
 been the motive power, he has said so. He has 
 dissected mental maladies without bungling; 
 he has not exaggerated them, though they 
 are a more frequent theme in his later books. 
 The only real immorality possible in art is 
 untruth. Mr. Hardy out of unhealthy soil 
 makes strange growths proceed. To lack of 
 restraint and sin he may not always give 
 the pedagogic punishment the moralist might 
 dictate, but they have their inevitable and 
 adequate consequence. Social law may be 
 held in contempt, but it is never ignored.
 
 230 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 / 
 
 Against this morbidity must be placed at 
 
 least two-thirds of his work, all his utter- 
 ance of the laughter of life, of the beauty 
 of the face of the outer world, and his deli- 
 cate portrayal of that other human nature 
 whose emotions live in an atmosphere of 
 cool, transparent purity, untempted from 
 within, simple, patient and staunch. Dick 
 Dewy, Gabriel, Giles, Marty, Elizabeth-Jane, 
 are as real as Troy and Eustacia, and as char- 
 acteristic of the mind of their maker. (Only, 
 he refuses to condemn passion, or even to 
 apologise for it ; indeed, justifies it, or any 
 other strong impulse of nature till it be proved 
 by reason, not convention, cruel and anti- 
 social in its indulgence/ There are uses for 
 every natural force, and though asceticism 
 and Puritanism, and every repressing creed 
 and code have borne flowers fair and fine, 
 that does not alter the fact that nature will 
 be corrupted rather more than less by starva- 
 tion and an underground life. 
 
 This claim for greater freedom to man's
 
 POINT OF VIEW 231 
 
 nature does not, as has been seen, accom- 
 pany a very light-hearted view of things. His 
 occasional grim earnestness, his intellectual 
 cast of mind, his brooding thoughtfulness, 
 his austerity, make all the more remarkable 
 his clear perception of the comedy in life. 
 His tolerance, indeed his enjoyment, of 
 caprice and vanity and all the feather-headed 
 human moods and ways, if only they be 
 young and graceful, may seem difficult to fit 
 in with his theory of the world. But in 
 truth they are the woof-threads of a sane 
 and liveable philosophy. 
 
 The observations on men and things 
 scattered in reflections about his novels, or 
 translated into characters and incidents, are 
 not of the kind best learnt in social assem- 
 blies. The shrewdness of the man of the 
 world is very little evident. He has scanned 
 human features as well as hearts with keenest 
 gaze, and his intercourse with men seems 
 never to have been languid. But his best 
 thought reflects a mind that has lived its
 
 232 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 intensest life apart. He is independent 
 and profound rather than brilliant. It is 
 just this aloofness, revealing itself in wisdom 
 and in beauty that have had leisure and quiet 
 to grow in, that has given coherence and con 
 sistencyto his novels, and made it worth while 
 trying to examine his point of view at all. 
 
 Not that he has posed as philosopher, or 
 even as poet. Indeed, it is hardly fitting to 
 force him into either part, and thus take 
 leave of him. Story-teller, picture-maker, 
 humourist, it is entertainment he offers us. 
 Only, the stories he has heard, and imagined, 
 and told us, have interpreted life to him, 
 and he lets us overhear the commentary 
 sometimes. And behind his vivid repre- 
 sentations of the human comedy is visible 
 something greater : a poetic intention which 
 his art has abundantly fulfilled. 
 
 Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty 
 at the Edinburgh University Press 
 
 5?42 8

 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIF 
 
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 This book is DUE on the las 
 
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